20 Things You Didn't Know About Yayoi Kusama

Image via Complex Original

Kusama's painting career began with her training in Kyoto, Japan in the late 1940s. She started working in a classical style of calligraphic Japanese painting called Nihonga.

Kusama's polka dots first appeared as hallucinations when she was 10 years old as a result of her tumultuous childhood. According to her autobiography Infinity Net, her mother was abusive; her father, a womanizer and mostly absent. Some feel that Kusama fictionalized the severity of her childhood visions to reaffirm her extreme art practice. Either way, the myth lives on.

Her correspondence to President René Coty simply read, "Dear Sir, I would like to see your country, France. Please help me." Coty's response embraced Kusama's eagerness to study art and encouraged her to enroll in a cultural exchange program.

After discovering O'Keeffe's paintings in a secondhand bookshop in her hometown of Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama traveled six hours by train to the American Embassy in Tokyo to look up O'Keeffe's address. She wrote a letter to the American artist that read, "Would you kindly show me the way to approach this life?"

In 1968 Kusama wrote a letter titled "Open Letter to My Hero Richard Nixon" about the Vietnam War, where she wrote, "Let's forget ourselves dearest Richard and become one with the Absolute, all together." Unfortunately the president refused the offer, and the war carried on.

Kusama lied to the Japanese government, saying that her first American show was complete, so that she could come to the US in 1957. To prepare for the trip, the (then) starving artist sewed money into her dress and tucked bills into the toes of her shoes. Then she boarded a plane to Seattle with 60 kimonos and 2,000 paintings.

After growing up in Japan, Kusama moved to Seattle in 1957 before arriving in New York City that same year. Her time in Seattle included a gallery show of her paintings at Zoe Dusanne Gallery.

After moving to New York City in 1957, her artistic practice blossomed to include public performative works carried out on the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park. These performance pieces were part of the many "happenings" going on in New York in the '50s and '60s, a term coined by Allan Kaprow that referred to the performance art popping up across the city.

One of Kusama's most well known happenings was a 1969 work, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MOMA, where Kusama painted her nude performers in polka dots in the courtyard of MoMA. Her other happenings ranged from commentaries on the Vietnam War to sexual liberation.

In addition to the throngs of her nude followers demonstrating in front of the New York Stock Exchange and MoMA in the name of sexual freedom and social protest, Kusama also formed the Kusama Dancing Team out of a group of young gay men. Her most extreme (and poorly received) social experiment was the Kusama Omophile Kompany (kok), a naked painting studio/gay club.

Though same-sex marriage was only considered legal in New York State on June 24, 2011, Kusama held a happening called Homosexual Marriage in 1968. Kusama presided over the union at 33 Walker Street in New York City, the location of her Church of Self-Obliteration.

Kusama's most well known film is her 1968 work, Self-Obliteration. She produced and starred in the prize-winning film where her polka dots run wild, flowing from her two-dimensional paintings and then re-emerging on the bodies of models.

Kusama's novels include Manhattan Suicide Addict, The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, The Burning of St. Mark's Church, Between Heaven and Earth, Woodstock Phallus Cutter, Arching Chandelier, Double Suicide at Sakuragazuka, and Angles in Cape Cod. She also wrote a book of poems and paintings, entitled 7, and contributed to several issues of the S&M magazine Sniper in collaboration with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.

Because of the recent upsurge in her international popularity, Kusama was invited to collaborate with Louis Vuitton in 2012. As a result of the auspicious partnership, Kusama was then asked to design the interiors for many of the high-end department stores carrying the line for the season.

In 1968, the artist founded Kusama Fashion Company Ltd., which appeared for a few seasons in Bloomingdale's in the aptly named "Kusama Corner" section.

Working in close quarters with other famous artists prompted a close friendship between Hesse and Kusama who, in retrospect were both labeled as Post-minimalists.

Both Judd and Stella purchased works from Kusama's first exhibition of paintings in New York in 1959. Judd, a critic for ARTnews at the time, reviewed the show with a great deal of enthusiasm: "the effect [of Kusama's Infinity Net] is both complex and simple. Essentially it is produced by the interaction of the two close somewhat parallel planes... at points merging at the surface... and at others diverging slightly but powerfully."

Kusama and Cornell were known to have been an item (although their relationship was supposedly sex-less). In Kusama's retrospective held at London's Tate Modern and the New York City's Whitney Museum in 2012, three pieces featured in the exhibition were works dedicated specifically to Cornell.

In 2008, Kusama's painting No. 2 sold for a record-breaking price for the artist at auction, $5,794,500 to be exact.

Today Kusama turns 85, and she has been making art for 60 years (and counting).