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The image of the tortured artist often seems to precede the images said artists create. The idea implies a level of disbelief that a person of perfectly sound mind and body could make art that reaches such profound depths and expansive heights.
Yayoi Kusama, the iconic Japanese artist whose signature polka dots have scaled museum walls and luxury fashion brands around the world, embraced mental turmoil as the origins of her quest to capture infinity through art. Retrospectives since her death on Aug. 14 have all retold this story of mental illness as the wellspring of her creativity.
But to get a fuller picture of what inspired Kusama, art historian Audrey Storm of the University of Southern California asks readers to look beyond the infinity nets Kusama cast over the New York and global art scenes. Instead, she suggests viewers consider a painting that captured who Kusama was before fame found her – as someone traveling over the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
“In these early years, before she achieved the global success and popular recognition she hoped for, she was just a young girl looking out the window on her first international flight, uncertain of where her future would take her,” Storm writes.
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