Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese painter of madness

Maybe without her Warhol's genius would never have been born, but we'll never know. What we can say for sure is that Yayoi Kusama, at 90, has caught the attention of the cultural mining crowd, out to rediscover the myth of a versatile, restless artist, as extravagant as she was efficient, brilliant and avant-garde. And all of it came out of a Japan very different from today's, one where psychedelia didn't sit too well with the country's traditionalism. Her life in the United States would change everything and let her exhibit alongside all those glories we still remember from the Pop Art scene. We're digging up the myth to admire the artist behind the artwork.

Yayoi Kusama's madness turned into art

It's impossible not to be drawn in the moment you look at her creations: irreverent, brimming with charisma… and with a madness as unearthly as she was. Yayoi Kusama is a product of her own life, and that life stayed with her to the end. Her childhood and adolescence were weighed down by an excess of emotional baggage, seasoned by the sexual abuse and physical violence she had suffered, which led her to develop auditory and visual hallucinations in her youth. Wanting to get away from all that horror, she left for New York to join the Avant-Garde, where the most innovative ideas in the United States were bubbling away. During those years she caught the eye of her colleagues and of the general public with an obsession with happenings in which Yayoi would paint people with bright polka dots.

“ I make my artworks to survive the pain, the wish to die”

For years she had to deal with an obsessive disorder and was admitted to psychiatric institutions many times. After many years of coming and going, she ended up shutting herself away in one of them. That's how the person disappeared and the myth was born. Yayui Kusama is still alive, but for decades nothing at all has been heard of her. All we get to enjoy is her artwork, that mixture of minimalism, Pop Art and self-declared feminist art.

Her love of writing led her to write several novels and books of poetry that are still on record today. And not just that. Some famously introspective quotes have come down to us from her, like “I make my artworks to survive the pain, the wish to die”.

The genius behind “Narcissus Garden”

Her best known artworks for the general public have been Narcissus Garden, shown in Venice, and the one that sold for the highest price was Infinity Nets in 2008, for a whopping 5.1 million. Her artworks never had the problem other painters had of going uncredited, but it was really her private life that set the rhythm of her work, because of the apparent contradiction between the vitality and optimism that marked her pieces and her dark, existentialist poetry.

Yayoi is, in a way, an icon of the artist who brings together genius and madness. It's certainly always been a recurring theme in the arts and in the sciences alike. This is our small tribute to an artist who lives on, immortal, in some of the best museums in the world.