HER CHILDHOOD And Yayoi did not experience just poverty and hunger. She started experiencing hallucinations as a child.
From Psychiatric News: - Around age 7, Kusama began hearing pumpkins, violets, and dogs talking to her. She often saw auras around objects and bursts of radiance along the mountainous skyline that made objects around her flash and glitter. “Whenever things like this happened, I would hurry back home and draw what I had just seen in my sketchbook,” she recalled in her autobiography. “Recording them helped to ease the shock and fear of the episodes. That is the origin of my pictures.
- "Psychiatry was not as accepted in my youth as it is now,” she added, “and I had to struggle on my own with the anxiety, to say nothing of the visions and hallucinations that at times overwhelmed me."
TWO FRIENDS ALONG THE WAY Yayoi had her first gallery show at 23 in 1952. One visitor was Dr. Nishimaru, a professor of psychiatry, who befriended her. He presented a paper at a conference, "Genius Woman Artist with Schizophrenic Tendency." Dr. Nishimaru urged her to move out of her parents' house. Being beaten and having her art destroyed by her mother had been a constant in the artist's life.
But it wasn't until the next year, 1953, that Yayoi made the connection that led her to the U.S. She was inspired by a book of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings -- so inspired that she sent O'Keefe 14 watercolors. O'Keefe forwarded Yayoi's art to several gallery owners, with her recommendation. And she told Yayoi she really needed to experience the art scene in New York City.
NEW YORK CITY Based on the work received from O'Keefe, a gallery in Seattle offered Yayoi a solo show in 1954. She came to the U.S., spent a few months in Seattle and then moved to New York. It was there that she started doing performance art, becoming part of the artistic and political scene -- and where she started painting her iconic polka-dots. They reminded her of the thousands of white pebbles in the stream near her childhood home.
As you can imagine, life for a young Japanese woman in the (almost) totally male art scene in New York was not easy. Yayoi experienced again and again displaying innovative ideas in galleries, and having them copied by male artists -- who then got credit for something new and original.
As recorded in an article by Amelie Pascutto in Daily Art Magazine, : - Yayoi displayed an armchair covered in stuffed fabric penises in a group show. Claes Oldenburg. also part of the show, then immediately made a giant fabric piece of cake and was acclaimed for having invented stuffed fabric art.
- Yayoi exhibited a room walled entirely with mirrors, reflecting the art on the floor and hanging from the ceiling (the first of her iconic "infinity rooms") -- and Lucas Samaras promptly did the same, and got oodles of attention for his brilliant new idea.
- Then Andy Warhol made a room wallpapered with one repetitive image -- after he saw Yayoi's creation of the same thing. You'll never guess what happened: The world responded with great acclaim to Warhol's inspiration.
To be clear: There is nothing wrong with artists copying other artists' ideas. It would be difficult to imagine the history of art without this going on constantly. But to come up with radically new ways of creating art again and again -- and seeing other artists, all men, copy your ideas and being credited as innovators and pioneers again and again -- It must be more than a tad irritating.
BACK TO JAPAN So, In 1977, Yayoi returned to Japan.
She voluntarily committed herself to a mental hospital in Tokyo. She lives there to this day, across the street from her studio.
From her autobiography, Infinity Net: - “Life in the hospital follows a fixed schedule. I retire at nine o’clock at night and wake up the next morning in time for a blood test at seven. At ten o’clock each morning I go to my studio and work until six or seven in the evening. In the evening, I write. These days I am able to concentrate fully on my work, with the result that since moving to Tokyo I have been extremely prolific.”
I am deeply moved by Yoyoi's courage. And I am grateful to the art-loving psychiatrist and our own Georgia O'Keefe, both of whom recognized her strange genius, and helped her along her path.
“I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live." | 
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