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Yayoi Kusama, the World’s Most Photographed Recluse

In 2012, the Whitney gave the polka-dot queen a dutiful retrospective. She gave it the slip.

(Editor’s note: This article was originally published on July 18, 2012.) It should be impossible to make a dull exhibition of work by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a feisty 83-year-old whose scale-defying work—”infinity net” paintings, polka-dot installations, happenings, as well as dabblings in media, fashion and commerce—might play equally well in a closet and an arena. Yet the Whitney Museum has managed to put on a tepid retrospective: a dutiful and limited presentation of an artist who is larger than life.

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Ms. Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto; her Japan was the one of war brides, American GIs and food shortages. The fragile paintings like Heart (1951) and Fern Kingdom (1953) that she made in the early 1950s using oil, enamel and housepaint as well as sand and—sometimes in place of canvas—seed sacks, on display in two rooms at the Whitney, are sweetly hallucinatory and surrealistic. Her conservative family disapproved of her painting habit, and while the Whitney’s wall text informs viewers that rationing in postwar Japan necessitated the use of such eccentric materials, Ms. Kusama herself recalls that her teenage rebellion took the form of pilfering goods from her parents’ plant nursery business to use as art supplies. The works often feature flower buds, and her hallmark dots start to appear in the painting God of the Wind (1955).

When she decided to move to the U.S., Ms. Kusama went to the American embassy, looked up Georgia O’Keeffe’s address in Who’s Who and wrote one of the determined, slightly deranged missives that would become her calling cards. O’Keeffe’s 1955 reply is on display: “It seems to me very odd that you are so ambitious to show your paintings here. But I wish the best for you.”

She finally made it to New York in 1958, when she was 29, and took up residence in a Zen center. The paintings she made shortly after arriving are still her best: rhythmic, cellular monochromes with surfaces so thick that the oil paint looks like baked porcelain. Her larger artistic project begins in earnest here: patterns cut up and........

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