An examination of Yayoi Kusama's work that goes beyond the usual biographical interpretation to consider her place in postwar global art history. 
Yayoi Kusama is the most famous artist to emerge from Japan in the period following World War II. Part of a burgeoning international art scene in the early 1960s, she exhibited in New York with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and other Pop and Minimalist luminaries, and in Europe with the Dutch Nul and the German Zero artist groups. Known for repetitive patterns, sewn soft sculptures, naked performance, and suggestive content, Kusama's work anticipated the politically charged feminist art of the 1970s. But Kusama and her work were soon eclipsed by a dealer-controlled art market monopoly of white male American artists. Returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama became almost as famous for her self-proclaimed mental illness and permanent residence in a psychiatric hospital as she was for her art. In this book, Midori Yamamura eschews the usual critical fascination with Kusama's biography to consider the artist in her social and cultural milieu. By examining Kusama's art alongside that of her peers, Yamamura offers a new perspective on Kusama's career.
Yamamura shows that Kusama, who came of age in totalitarian wartime Japan, embraced art as an anticonformist pursuit, seeking a subjective autonomy that resulted in the singular expression of her art. Examining Kusama's association with European and New York art movements of the 1960s and her creation of psychedelic light-and-sound “Happenings,” Yamamura argues that Kusama and her heterogeneous peers defied and undermined various pillars of modernity during the crucial transition from the modern nation-state to global free-market capitalism.
The art market rediscovered Kusama in the 1990s, and she has since had a series of high-profile exhibitions. Recounting Kusama's story, Yamamura offers an incisive, penetrating analysis of postwar art's globalization as viewed from the periphery.

Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular

Arts & Photography

Yamamura, Midori

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

Accompanying the first major American retrospective exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work, and an exhibition at Tate Modern in London, this volume offers a definitive monograph on Japan's most famous living artist. It features a wealth of works from all periods in Kusama's career, as well as essays by various international curators and critics, discussing Kusama's years in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and the psychoanalytic import of her art. Kusama's originality, innovation and sheer drive to make art have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades, encompassing painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance, installation and even product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York, and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city, becoming close with artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, and influencing many others along the way. It was in these years that Kusama was dubbed "the Polka Dot Princess," for her obsessive use of polka dots in installations and happenings. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition that she has recently achieved. Now in her ninth decade, Kusama's imagination remains fertile and productive, as she continues to devise dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-paints her ongoing series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings. Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She left Japan for New York at the age of 28, following a correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, and was soon participating in the city's 1960s wave of happenings and avant-garde activities. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and began writing surrealistic novels and poetry. On November 12, 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.

Yayoi Kusama

Applin, Jo

Nixon, Mignon

D.A.P./Tate

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yamamura, Midori. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Yamamura, Midori