Yayoi Kusama is one of the most important artists in the world.
Currently, Yayoi Kusama ranks 29th in the (computer-generated world ranking of art based on public impact), placing him in the top third of the 100 most sought-after artists in the world.
Yayoi Kusama is one of 17 women among the 100 best artists in the world (What was that? We don't need feminism anymore?).
Yayoi Kusama is one of only four women among the 100 best artists in the world who experienced World War II and a fascist society in the full awareness of their youth, yet still managed to make the leap into the free world of art. Two of these women, Louise Bourgeois and Jeanne-Claude, have already passed away; at the pinnacle of the art world, Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono now alone represent an entire generation of women who struggled throughout their lives with the long-term consequences of their experiences in their youth.
It took a great deal of strength for Yayoi Kusama to resist the senseless violence and hopelessness that she encountered even within her own family. Art was always a form of therapy for her; for the artist with the bright orange wig, taking the plunge into the art world was probably even a matter of survival.
A definite win for the art world – the life story of the artist behind the “striking orange cloak of invisibility” remains dramatic, and the products of her successful self-therapy have long delighted humanity as captivatingly beautiful art, and will forever continue to do so:
The Japanese pop art artist Yayoi Kusama Image source: 文部科学省ホームページ [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Yayoi Kusama's "Thing" or: World Artists Give the World More Than Beautiful Art
Yayoi Kusama is therefore one of the most important artists in the world because she enriched the world with new impulses that will be preserved for humanity forever.
All truly great artists, admired across time and cultures, are not famous for a few beautiful paintings or sculptures. They have all given humanity something that will exist as long as civilized human societies exist (also a reason to stand up against the current erosion of civilization).
Leonardo da Vinci discovered the perfect human proportion and much more (back then there was still so much to discover and very few people free enough to go on voyages of discovery).
The Impressionists gave people the light in their paintings, the Cubists brought the essence of things' form to the canvas, the Expressionists sought the uncertainties behind this essence… each of the truly great artists had “his thing”, which he transformed in a very special way, often even several “things”:
Arcimboldo painted the obvious, but in a completely new way and in a completely new combination; Warhol brought everyday life into art and perfected the art of self-presentation; Picasso, as a perpetual and ever-learning artist, created entire series of astonishing works of art; Gerhard Richter emulates him with an expanded range of expression and also made some new discoveries, and so on.
A reassuring side effect: If the crucial element of great art is its grand ideas, then great art in a networked world is inherently democratic . Because then it doesn't matter how many countries manage to preserve groundbreaking artworks in public collections for all citizens – a new perspective on things or a new pattern emerging from things cannot be bought up and locked away by some greedy egoist, but rather disseminated throughout the world with every exhibition and every report about art and artists. And stored online, to which, at least theoretically, everyone has access today…
Yayoi Kusama's "thing" is the dot, her form of expression since her youth, and for the past 80 years, "dots" have varied in every imaginable form, always inextricably linked within a series. Yayoi Kusama's dots are large and small, colorful or black, evenly or unevenly distributed; they always appear in large numbers, among themselves or in structures, patterns, and with lines.
Yayoi Kusama's serial dot art has been conquering the world for almost a century; colored dots on
The wonderful New York illustrator Ellen Weinstein and MoMA curator Sarah Suzuki, together with Kusama's studio in Japan, have just completed a polka dot book that introduces children around the world to Yayoi Kusama's polka dot galaxy. You can find some previews of “Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity!”www.dezeen.com/ .
There were other painters who worked with dots, for example Australian Aborigines: bit.ly/2hlKIpX . From 1885 onwards, an entire style of Pointillism painted pictures with one dot next to another, e.g. Paul Baum 's "Willows by the Stream" in Sint Anna ter Muiden, Netherlands, in 1900, bit.ly/2sdhKN9 .
In the video “Earth is a Polka Dot”, Yayoi Kusama explains her universal polka dot obsession using her “Mirror Rooms” as an example (the first was created in 1965, www.wikiart.org/en/yayoi-kusama/infinity-mirror-room-1965):
Creating a 'Mirror Room' was a great gamble for me. By using light, reflection, and so on, I wanted to capture the cosmic image—beyond the world we live in. The result is the powerful, radiant, and mysterious image of a "mirror room"—my hands react to the brush and canvas on their own, beginning to work before I've thought or planned anything. I only look at the finished piece and am always surprised by the result. I've made many "Mirror Rooms," each one with great care. They are mysterious and astonishing, giving us a glimpse of the endless existence of electrically charged dot patterns.
When I first saw the piece, it seemed fantastic to me; I became a fanatical fan of the work. While I'm working, I don't think about polka dot patterns—the dots line up spontaneously from my subconscious. I'm not sure if they're suggestions from my illness or if I wanted to paint it that way because I become completely absorbed in my work, and everything else around me fades away. Besides, I don't know, I think that as an artist, my greatest task is to follow my vision… We are born on Earth. Well, the moon is a polka dot, the sun is a polka dot, and the Earth we live on is also a polka dot. And you can even find them in some form in the eternal, mysterious cosmos. Through them, I try to fathom the philosophy of life
Yayoi Kusama herself calls these dots "polka dots ," presumably the most fitting translation from Japanese, since there are no words yet for something new. Anyone who engages with her art, however, will certainly not reduce her work to the polka dot pattern on Minnie Mouse's dress.
The “polka dot as Yayoi Kusama’s trademark” is, however, a great example of what we can expect in terms of information from/about search engines: 682,000 pages, boasts our favorite search engine, are available to provide information about Yayoi Kusama and her trademark Polka Dots.
The results shrink to 258 when you click through to the end; it becomes clear long before that these search results have little to say about either Yayoi Kusama or polka-dots. However, the incorrect trademark can help in finding more carefully written articles: “+Yayoi+Kusama+dots -Polka” yields 294 articles written “for content” rather than “for keywords”.
Anyone who still wants to know why the history of the polka dot is often misrepresented or its meaning distorted, and that the polka dot has nothing to do with polka, will find comprehensive information about the not always pleasant history of dots in this article: slate.me/2HeY8gF .
Yayoi Kusama has certainly given the world polka dots, just as Niki de Saint Phalle delighted us with her Nanas; these polka dots even moved into their own museum on September 27, 2017; here is the story behind the dots:
Yayoi Kusama's difficult rise and fall
Yayoi Kusama was born in Japan in 1929, not with polka dots, but rather into the complete opposite of lighthearted, carefree fun. Her parents were said to have been "fully involved" in cultivating the oppressive atmosphere of the then-fascist military state. Her father was a wealthy seed merchant and deeply entrenched in conservative traditions, especially the tradition of the brothel full of geishas, where, at her mother's insistence, his daughter was even allowed to spy on him.
What she witnessed there thoroughly "crashed" the teenager's emerging sexuality; apart from the sick situation, one shouldn't assume that the father was among the gifted lovers.
The mother was no better: herself oppressed and frustrated, she apparently passed on her frustration and fear to her daughter without any filter. As is so often the case, the lack of strength for self-determined action and humane treatment of the children dependent on their mother was hidden under the cloak of tradition or convention, which one absolutely had to adhere to.
Sending the daughter to a brothel to watch her father having sex doesn't really fit with the established tradition (or does it? Was this desperate action meant to attract attention?), but few severely beleaguered mothers have the strength not to take out their aggression on their harmless/defenseless, dependent offspring.
They often live in a kind of chronic trauma that threatens to consume them… Such situations often lead to a vicious cycle, the effects of which can be suffered by future generations if the offspring do not decide to remain childless like Yayoi Kusama.
Yayoi Kusama – “Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees at the Singapore Biennale 2006” by Terence Ong [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Furthermore, appealing to tradition and convention is very practical for overwhelmed parents with a lack of empathy: it also saves them from having to make any effort to develop any kind of understanding for their child.
Thus, Yayoi Kusama grew up to be a dreamy, shy, anxious child who very early on escaped into painting and a world of dots all his own.
And it doesn't take much imagination to realize that it's not good for such a child to have to work in a parachute factory from the age of 12 in the middle of World War II (because it's a tradition in wealthy/state-supporting families to support their country in the war).
The worst thing about this situation for Yayoi Kusama was that she was never allowed to experience security; constant pressure and rejection from both her father and mother led to complete alienation from her parents at an early age – and ultimately to a result of this unpleasant childhood that the artist will carry with her for the rest of her life: Kusama's psyche was damaged to such an extent that she still lives voluntarily in the low-stimulus environment of a psychiatric hospital.
This illness began during her more traumatic than dreamlike childhood and manifested itself in hallucinations, which Kusama later reported:
I looked at the red pattern on the tablecloth, and when I looked up, the same red pattern covered the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally the entire room, my body, and the universe. I began to dissolve, finding myself in the boundlessness of endless time and the absoluteness of surface. I reduced myself to absolute nothingness
Instead of dissolving “into dot and net patterns”, Yayoi Kusama, even as a very young woman, demonstrated a great degree of courage, strength and power, which saved her from (and would save her for life) slipping into a fatal depression and allowed her – almost as an aside – to mature into a world-renowned artist.
She demonstrated such a high degree of "instinctive expertise" in improving her own situation that therapists, when occasionally treating her, were always able to limit themselves to providing support and were never tempted to impose any therapies. Her self-therapy included several important measures:
1. Yayoi Kusama spoke openly about her illness from the beginning and sought help and support wherever she could get it.
She began her psychiatric treatment as early as 1952 and may have been luckier than people currently in a comparable situation: After the surrender, reconstruction began in Japan, initially under Allied occupation, which helped build a stable, peaceful democracy. During this reconstruction, great emphasis was placed on "more civilization," which meant that not only trained personnel treated people with ailments with empathy.
Furthermore, physical and mental wounds are normal in war-torn societies (somewhat more so in Japan because of the atomic bomb, somewhat less so in Germany because of the Nazis who murdered anyone who deviated from the norm), and shortly after the war, people appreciate their remaining fellow citizens somewhat more again.
2. Yayoi Kusama has found a purpose in life that fulfills her.
Kusama knew very early in her youth that she wanted to become an artist.
From about the age of 10, she drew constantly; at 18, she made a brief foray into poetry, only to discover that the "color on surface" method best expressed her ideas.
3. Yayoi Kusama has taken action against what burdens her in her daily work
Kusama achieved this by incorporating her hallucinations into her art, making them an integral part of her art.
Even in her earliest drawings as a child, she already incorporated the patterns and hallucinations that overwhelmed her into her artwork. And she will never stop doing so (boring? Think about it – you can do so much with dots, and you can immediately think of dozens of jobs with more boring daily routines).
4. Yayoi Kusama broke free from the oppressive environment
Kusama kept the period of constant pressure, rejection by or alienation from her parents as short as possible.
At 19, in 1948, she was able to escape to the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts (allowed by her mother only on the condition that she learn Japanese etiquette from relatives in Kyoto).
When Kusama realized how difficult it was for a woman to gain a foothold in the Japanese art world, she didn't hesitate to move even further away. The clearly talented young woman had nine exhibitions in Japan in the early 1950s, six of them solo exhibitions, her very first solo exhibition being in 1952 at the Matsumoto Civic Hall (the civic hall of her hometown). She became known throughout Japan at that time, but was nevertheless largely rejected by the Japanese art world as a woman.
When her works were to be exhibited at the 18th Brooklyn Museum Biennial in 1955, she took the opportunity to move to New York. Her parents lent her the money for the flight, but only on the condition that she would never return.
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Terracotta belly vase with rattan details, black (size: M)
54,95 €
