Yayoi Kusama, whose distinctive language of repetition, polka dots and infinite space transformed contemporary art and made her one of the world’s most recognisable living artists. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Sotheby’s, published with The $1m+ Contemporary Market, its report produced with ArtTactic.
Remembering an artist whose extraordinary seven-decade career is a reminder that the artists who eventually define culture are rarely obvious at the beginning.
Yayoi Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97.
By the end of her life, she had become almost impossible to separate from contemporary visual culture. There were the pumpkins. The endless fields of dots. The mirrored rooms. Museum queues stretching around buildings. Louis Vuitton stores transformed by her imagery. George Clooney dressed head to toe in Kusama polka dots. Paintings changing hands for millions of dollars.
At the time of her death, David Zwirner described her as perhaps the most famous living artist in the world.
But the story becomes considerably more interesting when you go back to the beginning.
Because none of this was inevitable.
Before the dots were famous
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929 and began making art while still a child.
The dots, nets and repeated forms that would later become instantly recognisable were not initially conceived as branding. They emerged from vivid visual hallucinations she had experienced from an early age.
She described seeing patterns spreading beyond the object in front of her, across the walls, across herself and eventually across entire spaces. Painting became a way of processing and controlling those experiences.
Her family did not particularly encourage the idea of an artistic career. Her mother strongly opposed it, and Kusama later described Japan at the time as too restrictive for the kind of artist she wanted to become.
Her ambition was somewhere else.
New York.
With almost no connections in America, Kusama did something remarkably audacious. She found an image of Georgia O'Keeffe's work in a book and simply wrote to her, enclosing examples of her own paintings and asking for advice.
O'Keeffe replied.
Kusama eventually left Japan, first reaching Seattle in 1957 and then New York in 1958.
It is worth remembering how improbable that move was.
She was a young Japanese woman entering an overwhelmingly male, Western art establishment with limited English, limited money and an artistic vocabulary that looked unlike almost anything being made around her.
She later remembered New York as a "fierce and violent place."
And yet this was where some of her most important work began.
Yayoi Kusama with Infinity Net paintings in her New York studio, 1961. Working across vast canvases, Kusama built their surfaces from thousands of repeated, hand-painted loops. Image via David Zwirner.
Source page: David Zwirner: Kusama with Infinity Net paintings in her New York studio
The $75 paintings
In 1959, Kusama exhibited a group of vast white paintings covered with thousands upon thousands of tiny looping brushstrokes.
She called them the Infinity Nets.
Yayoi Kusama, No. F, 1959. Oil on canvas, 105.4 × 132.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sid R. Bass Fund. © Yayoi Kusama. Image via David Zwirner.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sid R. Bass Fund. Copyright © 2017 Yayoi Kusama.
Today they are among the most historically important works of her career.
At the time, critical interest did not translate into financial success.
Kusama struggled for money. Fellow artists Donald Judd and Frank Stella were among the people who supported her, and early Infinity Net paintings were reportedly sold to them for around $75 each.
Major commercial representation was another matter.
Artists around her were increasingly being absorbed into the emerging New York gallery establishment. Judd, Stella and others found powerful representation.
Kusama did not.
A New Yorker profile later summed up the extraordinary imbalance: her paintings might sell for $150 or $200, while no major gallery was willing to commit to representing her.
That detail is difficult to forget when looking at what happened next.
In May 2022, a 1959 Kusama painting titled Untitled (Nets) sold at Phillips in New York for $10.5 million.
Yayoi Kusama, Untitled (Nets), 1959. Oil on canvas, 130.8 × 116.5 cm. Sold at Phillips New York on 18 May 2022 for $10,496,000, setting a new auction record for the artist. Image courtesy of Phillips.
From $75 to $10.5 million is a spectacular numerical comparison.
But the more important transformation was cultural.
The market eventually caught up with the artist.
New York before Pop became Pop
Kusama was not simply watching the American avant-garde emerge.
She was part of it.
Her work moved rapidly beyond painting into sculpture, installation, fashion, film and performance.
She covered furniture in strange repeated soft forms. She staged happenings. She experimented with mirrored environments. She produced provocative public performances concerned with sexuality, peace and opposition to the Vietnam War.
And she began covering people, objects and spaces with dots.
Yayoi Kusama with Harry Shunk and János Kender, The Anatomic Explosion, New York, 1968. Gelatin silver print, 24.5 × 19.5 cm. Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
During the late 1960s, her public profile in New York was significant enough to rival some of the artists now regarded as the canonical figures of the period.
W Magazine later wrote that her celebrity at the time rivalled Andy Warhol's.
Yet art history does not move in straight lines.
As Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and others became central figures in post-war American art, Kusama gradually receded from the international conversation.
She returned to Japan in 1973.
In 1977 she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she would continue to live while working from a nearby studio.
For many artists, disappearing from the centre of the New York art world might have marked the end of the story.
For Kusama, it became the middle.
The comeback
One of the most remarkable aspects of Kusama's career is how late her transformation into a global superstar really occurred.
A major moment came in 1993.
Twenty-seven years after she had unofficially appeared at the Venice Biennale with her Narcissus Garden installation, Kusama returned to Venice as Japan's official representative.
Yayoi Kusama with Narcissus Garden at the 33rd Venice Biennale, 1966. The installation comprised 1,500 mirrored spheres, which Kusama offered to visitors for two dollars each in a provocative critique of the art market. Image via Gropius Bau.
Her Japanese Pavilion presentation brought together early paintings, sculptures and new work. At its centre was Mirror Room (Pumpkin), an environment filled with yellow, black-dotted pumpkins reflected repeatedly into apparent infinity.
Yayoi Kusama, Mirror Room (Pumpkin), 1991, installed in the Japan Pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale, 1993. The landmark presentation helped initiate the international reassessment of Kusama’s career. Courtesy of The Japan Foundation, Japan Pavilion Official Website.
The presentation helped trigger a major reassessment of her career.
The artist who had once struggled to find major gallery representation was slowly being rewritten into the history of post-war art.
Then something even bigger happened.
The public fell in love with the work.
When an artist becomes a cultural language
Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms eventually became among the most recognisable museum installations of the twenty-first century.
The experience was remarkably simple.
Enter a small space.
Close the door.
Lights, mirrors and repeated forms appear to continue forever.
For a few seconds, the architecture disappears and the viewer appears to float inside an endless environment.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, mirrors, plastic, acrylic, rubber, LED lighting, acrylic balls and water. Collection of The Broad, Los Angeles. © Yayoi Kusama. Image via David Zwirner.
Long before museums were debating how Instagram might change exhibition attendance, Kusama had created art people desperately wanted to photograph themselves inside.
A 2017 exhibition at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum attracted approximately 475,000 visitors, then a record for the institution.
Her work crossed that unusual threshold where contemporary art becomes recognisable even to people who do not follow contemporary art.
The pumpkin became Kusama.
The dots became Kusama.
The red wig became Kusama.
The artist herself became inseparable from the visual universe she had spent decades constructing.
Kusama x Louis Vuitton
Fashion understood the power of that visual language very quickly.
Kusama had actually experimented with clothing decades earlier. By the late 1960s she had established the Kusama Fashion Company and was selling her own designs.
But her collaborations with Louis Vuitton took the relationship between her art and fashion onto an entirely different scale.
The first major Louis Vuitton collaboration arrived in 2012 under Marc Jacobs.
Then, in 2023, Louis Vuitton and Kusama returned with an enormous second project.
Painted dots appeared across bags, shoes, clothing and accessories. Pumpkins appeared on Louis Vuitton products. Storefronts around the world became Kusama installations. Giant sculptures appeared on buildings. Even Louis Vuitton's connected watch incorporated her motifs.
Louis Vuitton’s Champs-Élysées flagship transformed for the 2023 Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama collaboration. A monumental 14-metre figure of Kusama appeared to paint her signature dots across the building’s façade. Image: DR, via Le Point.
The collaboration became something far larger than artist merchandise. It demonstrated what can happen when an artist develops a visual language powerful enough to travel seamlessly between a museum, a painting, architecture, fashion and popular culture.
Then there was George Clooney
One of our favourite examples came in 2013.
For W Magazine's Art Issue, Kusama turned one of Hollywood's most recognisable faces into part of her artwork.
George Clooney appeared wearing a Giorgio Armani suit, shirt, bow tie and shoes customised by Kusama with her signature dots, standing inside an equally dotted environment.
George Clooney photographed by Emma Summerton for W Magazine’s December/January 2013 Art Issue, with art direction by Yayoi Kusama. Giorgio Armani suit, shirt, bow tie and shoes customised by Kusama; styling by Michael Kucmeroski; set design by Thomas Thurnauer. © Emma Summerton / W Magazine.
The resulting images are wonderfully absurd.
One of the world's most famous movie stars effectively disappears into Kusama's universe.
That was precisely the point.
Kusama called the idea self-obliteration: the individual becomes absorbed into an infinite field.
Celebrity, fashion and contemporary art had all become supporting actors inside a concept she had begun exploring more than half a century earlier.
And then the market caught up
Commercial recognition followed institutional recognition.
In 2014, one of Kusama's early Infinity Net paintings sold for approximately $7.1 million, at the time setting an auction record for a living female artist.
Then came further multimillion-dollar results.
A 2013 Pumpkin achieved approximately $8 million.
Another large pumpkin reached approximately the same level.
And in 2022, Untitled (Nets) from 1959 achieved $10.5 million.
Sotheby's data covering 2018 to the first half of 2023 recorded an average auction price of around $2.8 million among the Kusama works within its $1 million-plus market analysis.
There is an obvious temptation to look at those numbers and reduce the lesson to investment.
Buy an artist early. Wait. Make money.
The reality is far more interesting than that.
Nobody buying an early Kusama for $75 could have calculated Louis Vuitton collaborations, international museum retrospectives, queues around city blocks and eight-figure auction prices sixty years later.
What they could do was recognise an artist producing something original.
And support it.
Why this matters to us
At D’Stassi Art, this is the part of Kusama's story that resonates most strongly.
We spend much of our time looking forward rather than backwards.
Finding artists.
Putting work on walls.
Introducing collectors.
Building exhibitions.
Creating opportunities.
Helping artists find an audience before the wider market has necessarily decided what their careers will become.
There is something extraordinary about meeting an artist during that stage.
Because every established artist once existed there.
Before the museum exhibition.
Before the waiting lists.
Before the auction records.
Before the major galleries.
Before the fashion collaborations.
Before everybody recognised the name.
There was simply the work and a relatively small number of people prepared to believe in it.
Kusama's story illustrates that better than almost anyone.
Collecting is participation
There is another reason the story matters.
People often describe art collecting purely in terms of ownership.
We think that misses something.
When you buy a work from an emerging artist, particularly early in their career, you become part of that artist's ecosystem.
Collectors fund studios.
They make exhibitions possible.
They introduce artists to other collectors.
Their walls become some of the first places those works live outside the studio.
And occasionally, over many years, you get the remarkable privilege of watching an artist you supported become part of culture.
Financial appreciation can sometimes accompany that journey.
Kusama demonstrates just how dramatic that appreciation can theoretically become.
But no credible gallery can promise which artist will become the next Kusama, Basquiat, Haring or Warhol.
That uncertainty is precisely what makes discovery interesting.
The opportunity is to look before consensus forms.
To develop your eye.
To meet artists.
To live with the work.
And perhaps to recognise something important while the rest of the world is still deciding.
An infinite legacy
Yayoi Kusama continued painting until the final days of her life.
Her studio's announcement of her death described a lifetime devoted completely to artistic creation and a continuing belief in art as a source of hope and strength.
Yayoi Kusama at the press preview of I Who Have Arrived in Heaven, David Zwirner, New York, November 2013. Photograph via Getty Images and Tatler Asia.
She leaves behind paintings, sculptures, performances, fashion, literature, mirrored rooms, pumpkins and probably several billion polka dots.
But she also leaves behind one of the most extraordinary career arcs in contemporary art.
A young woman leaves Japan looking for a larger world.
She arrives in New York virtually unknown.
She makes radical paintings.
Some sell for $75.
Major galleries pass.
She becomes part of the avant-garde.
She disappears from its centre.
She returns decades later.
Venice follows.
Museums follow.
Collectors follow.
The market follows.
Louis Vuitton follows.
Millions of people follow.
And eventually the visual language she created as a young artist becomes recognisable across the world.
For galleries, artists and collectors alike, there is something deeply encouraging in that.
Great careers rarely arrive fully formed.
Sometimes they begin with an artist, an idea, an empty wall and somebody willing to believe early.
That is still one of the most exciting things about collecting contemporary art.