Just over two weeks before a landmark retrospective of Yayoi Kusama’s vast and varied oeuvre was scheduled to open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the institution announced that the show had “now become a posthumous tribute.”
The exhibition, which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 17, spans more than seven decades of work — including pieces never before seen in Europe, as well as site-specific installations made expressly for the event — by the prolific Japanese artist, who died Aug. 14 at age 97. This is its final stop after iterations at Fondation Beyeler near Basel, Switzerland, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany — and the final chance for visitors to see the last show Kusama worked on in her lifetime.
Those making a pilgrimage to see her immersive mirrored installations, bright yellow pumpkins or patterned motifs that had her dubbed “the Queen of Polka Dots” won’t be disappointed. Most significantly — and now, rather movingly — the show traces the incredibly wide-ranging and pioneering trajectory of her art, which goes far beyond the ubiquitous, much-selfied works for which she is now best known.
Kusama, who was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a mountainous region in central Japan where her affluent family ran a plant nursery, trained her eye on the profusion of nature at her doorstep: flora that bloomed and faded through endless cycles of regeneration.
She began drawing at a young age, and the earliest works in this exhibition date to when she was 5. While there can be an aspect of retrospective mythmaking to chronologically hung exhibitions when they include such juvenilia, in Kusama’s case, the singularity of her vision — at once artistically and psychologically motivated — is evident from the beginning.
“Untitled” (1934), a double-sided graphite and pastel drawing, shows a still life on one side and a village scene, with figures in traditional Japanese dress and mountains high in the distance, on the other. Both are brightly colored, and both are covered with dots big and small, as if a cosmic net had been thrown over the world.
The same is true of an untitled double-sided drawing from 1939: Flowers in a vase on a table teem with dots and netted patterns, as does a young woman with her eyes closed. Dots cover her face and stream through her hair, shower her clothes and drift across a dark background.
Kusama experienced visual and auditory hallucinations from an early age. Later in her life, she described walking through a field with her grandfather when a pumpkin seemed to come to life and address her. She had similar experiences with animals and flowers. In some visions, organic patterns, nets and dots multiplied in space and appeared to cover the world, including Kusama’s body. Fixing these to paper was a means of both exploring and controlling these experiences.
At 19, the artist convinced her conservative-minded parents to let her attend art school in Kyoto, on the basis that she would study the traditional Nihonga painting method. She quickly made it her own, focusing again on organic motifs combined with patterns, and was soon staging successful public exhibitions.
Works from this period until she moved to New York in 1957 are delicate, surprising and sometimes haunting, with references to the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are also incredibly rare: Desperate for a fresh slate, she destroyed much of her art before leaving for the United States, a move spurred by a correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe. (Those charming letters are on display in a vitrine.)
Kusama’s success in New York came quickly, thanks largely to her dogged vision and copious output. She began working there on a series of (until recently still ongoing) works called “infinity net paintings” — canvases covered edge to edge with finely painted, typically monochrome lattices.
A suite of these hangs in a row at the Stedelijk, in whites, grays and reds. They are dazzling: The eye can’t stop moving around the canvas, looking for somewhere to rest, focusing on infinite gradations of hue, zooming in on details only to be pushed back out to take in the whole, which seems to have no end.
This relentless sense of accrual — as if the world, its images and materials would not stop reproducing — also spilled over into a sculptural practice that sometimes merged with performance. Part Pop, part Assemblage, part Surrealism, part body art, part fashion, part who-even-knows, this work is perhaps Kusama’s most her and is still fresh, funny and uncanny to behold.
A gorgeous display with long sightlines collects these “accumulation” works in which objects, clothes, furniture, mannequins and even a rowboat are covered with fabric protrusions painted in silver, gold or chalky white. A chair seems to writhe with bulbous growths; high-heeled shoes have sprouted potato bunions; “A Snake” (1974) is more vertical than horizontal, festooned with strange tendrils growing skyward; and “Phallic Girl” (1967) lives up to her name, with unstoppable protuberances covering her body.
Kusama described her use of phallic forms as a means of warding off sexual phobias dating from childhood, when her mother ordered her to spy on her philandering father. While they possess a kind of swarming anxiety, these works also signal the artist’s interest in repeated forms and patterns that continued to dominate her later work made in Tokyo, where she lived in a psychiatric hospital from 1977 onward.
The art in subsequent rooms is tidier, larger in scale, more familiar, but no less arresting in its maniacal focus on replicative polka dots and nets, and interconnected cellular or tubular forms. In the midst of this infinite recurrence, we might achieve, as Kusama phrased it, a kind of “obliteration” of the individual.
No doubt, many visitors will flock to record themselves in the newest (and now, last) “infinity room” that takes up an entire floor of the museum, a cavernous space filled with Kusama’s signature polka-dot tendrils — huge, inflated and reflected ad infinitum in mirrors.
When you step through a mirrored door leading to a smaller mirrored box within this room, you don’t have to focus on your own reflection. Instead, you can look at the golden lights around you, multiplying like fireflies or stars or particles of gold dust. And you can ask, as Kusama did in her 2010 poem “Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict”: “Was the beauty of the end of one’s life nothing more than an illusion?” Here we are, left with her end, and the gift of being subsumed in a vast world beyond ourselves.
Yayoi Kusama
Through Jan. 17 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; www.stedelijk.nl.
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