The skyscrapers of New York do not allow us to see clearly the intricate forest of the life and work of Yayoi Kusama (1929), the most sought-after and well-known artist in the world whose work was considered for years little less than superficial and marginal. She was a woman, she was oriental, she was too good, too ahead of her time. For those who dictated what was yes and what was not, he was nobody.
Kusama, who continues to create in her Japanese studio and lives of her own free will in a nearby mental sanatorium, tried to start her particular artistic revolution in New York. They were happenings, parties in which he painted semi-naked bodies, in which he made his own clothes, in which the street was his workshop. But in New York she was seen as a weirdo.
The skyscrapers of the Big Apple covered up a parallel story for years, the five years in which Kusama traveled and spent long creative and very fruitful periods in the Netherlands. Yes, the queen of polka dots, pumpkins and endless forests, had a volcanic epiphany with her art in Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft (Veermer territory) and also in Schiedam, a beautiful city in South Holland, on the border with Rotterdam .
In Schiedam, the tallest building in the town center is… an imposing mill that reveals a dreamy navy blue sky when night falls. The Stedelijk, the city's municipal museum, presents in a large exhibition the missing pieces of the artist's very complex artistic and vital puzzle.
A puzzle that goes through personal neuroses and traumas, thematic obsessions and movements such as post-war art, the ZERO movement, Pop Art and performance. The museum, which was a religious center that still preserves its chapel and pulpit, demonstrates how Kusama found in the Netherlands the drive, the liberal atmosphere and the understanding of artistic circles that did not put restrictions on the daring of the Japanese artist.
During her stay, Kusama begins to mold, sculpt and paint penises in large quantities and organize soirées in which brush in hand turns attendees into living sculptures full of colored dots, the trademark of the artist of infinite landscapes. and the giant pumpkins.
“In the works that we exhibit you can see her traumas around her sexuality, but also the rampant energy of a few years of sexual and political revolution, from 1965 to 1970, in which she found an environment conducive to her,” she tells Magazine. Anne de Haij, the museum director.
“Here he makes his art much more explicit, it appears a lot in the local newspapers. Although she was not interested in sex, she called free sex in her performances, she, we already know, calls herself a priestess,” she recalls.
It is in Holland where Kusama begins to experiment with clothing, she sews the garments and creates a series of dresses made from all kinds of varieties of pasta, macaroni, spaghetti, farfalle glued to fabrics painted in very bright colors...
Many of the pieces are original, although this is not the case of the metal balls that occupy one of the museum's rooms and which are a replica of those installed in the street, as a protest, outside the Venice Biennale program. and that he will end up selling one by one at a symbolic price in what is interpreted as one of his first great triumphs.
“That was an off-program action that she organized with the help of, for example, Lucio Fontana. She placed the pieces between some of the official pavilions, dressed in a kimono and holding a sign that says a piece of art for two dollars or two hundred lire. She sold them all, yes. The originals are scattered all over the world. Kusama was very brave, breaking the rules of the art world, something she had tried without success for a long time,” says the director.
But in New York they still didn't pay much attention to him and from there he decided that he wasn't going to try it anymore, that he was going to go his own way and make it bigger. It is known that in those years the artist transitioned into writing and cinema. She films a documentary based, in part, on Woodstock. Of course, nudes are guaranteed.
He couldn't release it in the United States no matter how agitated the country was protesting against Vietnam and burning bras and trying to understand Marcuse and Adorno. “It premiered at the Knokke film festival,” they say at the museum, referring to the Belgian town located six kilometers from the Dutch border.
The flowers cover a good part of the exhibition and that is nothing more than a tribute to that vision that the artist had as a child in which the roses on the tablecloth in the family house "begin to expand throughout the room and begin to fly." illustrates De Haij.
It is a vision that accompanies her to this day, just like repetition and infinity. These are, experts point out, points of contact with the Dutch ZERO Group, where there is no figuration, neither beginning nor end.
Kusama is able to create something that looks from the 22nd century when in reality, in another context, it would have an old mid-20th century look with mannequins that do not move, but that appear to have movement due to the colors with which they are painted. You can also see the first, or one of the artist's first 'infinity rooms', those that fill museums around the world.
It is curious how art, no matter how rudimentary it may seem (in this case due to the materials) survives. Yayoi Kusama was already a genius in 1965 although the art world did not recognize her until 40 years later. One of the oldest artists in the world is one of the few who connect perfectly with young people who approach a world that they sometimes see as distant and incomprehensible.
