Polka-Dot Artist Yayoi Kusama Dies at 97

Kusama is born in Matsumoto, Japan, to a wealthy family that ran plant nurseries. She begins having hallucinations as a child, seeing dots and nets swallow the room around her, and draws what she sees.

At 13 she is conscripted to sew fabric for Japanese army parachutes. She later studies traditional nihonga painting in Kyoto.

Rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves Japan for New York. Georgia O'Keeffe, to whom Kusama had mailed her work, helped her get a foothold in the United States, according to Deutsche Welle.

She sells one of her "infinity net" paintings — dense fields of dotted brushwork — to artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd for $75.

She begins her "soft sculptures," furniture and ladders smothered in white stuffed phallic shapes, work she said was an attempt to confront her fear of sex as something dirty.

Uninvited, she stages "Narcissus Garden" at the Venice Biennale — 1,500 mirrored spheres on the lawn, which she offers for $2 apiece under the sign "Your narcissism for sale." Officials shut the sale down.

Her New York "happenings" turn political: she stages the city's first "homosexual wedding" in Tribeca, washes a Soviet flag outside the United Nations to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and writes to President Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War.

Back in Japan and in deteriorating mental health after the 1972 death of her close friend, the artist Joseph Cornell, she checks herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital with art therapy courses — and decides to live there permanently, working daily in a nearby studio.

She returns to the Venice Biennale as Japan's officially invited artist, filling a mirrored room with pumpkin sculptures.

Retrospectives at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1998), Tate Modern in London (2012) and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington (2017) turn her into a blockbuster draw.

Her painting "White No 28" sells for $7.1 million at auction, then a record for a living female artist.

Kusama dies in a Tokyo hospital, her studio said.