There are artists whose deaths seem to close a chapter in art history, and there are others whose departure produces almost the opposite sensation: that the language they created has become so thoroughly absorbed into our collective visual consciousness that their physical absence is difficult to comprehend. Yayoi Kusama, who died in Tokyo on Aug. 14 at the age of 97, belongs emphatically to the latter category. Her studio announced her death on Aug. 27 with an almost unbearably appropriate final detail: that she had continued painting until her last days, never setting aside the brush through which she had spent nearly a century exploring infinity, eternal love and the possibility of an existence beyond the boundaries of the individual self.
It would be easy, following her death, to remember Kusama through the spectacular surfaces that made her one of the most recognizable artists on the planet: yellow pumpkins colonized by black dots, rooms multiplied into apparent infinity through mirrors and light, monumental flowers, obsessive nets, dazzling colors and environments into which visitors disappear only to rediscover themselves reflected hundreds, perhaps seemingly thousands, of times. Yet to remember her merely through the visual vocabulary that eventually made her famous would be to mistake the seductive surface for the considerably more complicated structure beneath it.
