| | TITLE | Yayoi Kusama | IMPRINT | D.A.P./Tate | PRICE US | $49.95 CDN $49.95 | ISBN | 9781935202813 TRADE | FORMAT | Hbk, 8.75 x 10.75 in., 208 pgs, 195 color, 51 b&w. | CATALOG | SPRING 2012 p. 11 | DISTRIBUTOR | D.A.P. | PUB DATE | 2/29/2012 | STATUS | Active | STOCK | In stock |
| "Staying in Japan was out of the question. My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice ... For art like mine—art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die—this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, a wider world."
—Yayoi Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama."Like many another artist émigré, Kusama had a plan, and it began, as such schemes often do, with what she was able to carry on her back, and sell: a cache of small works on paper, luminous drawings in gouache, ink and pastel. A film of Kusama's New York years might find her peeling the sheets leaf by leaf from the luggage that accompanied her from Tokyo to Seattle to New York, offering them as calling cards and as barter. Early scenes might feature marathon sessions of solitary work as she painted her vast Infinity Nets, and nocturnal raids when she liberated discarded items from the street, and sat for hours with her neighbor Donald Judd stitching and stuffing cotton sacks to fashion the stiff phallic protuberances she would use to cover her Accumulation sculptures. Her prodigious energies would soon migrate to installations, happenings, body painting, film, fashion and 'sexual revolution'. She would protest the war in Vietnam with an 'Anatomic Explosion' on Wall Street. She would become a tabloid sensation.By the time she left New York and returned to Japan for good in 1973, Kusama was, by popular account, 'as famous as Andy Warhol'. But her appeal for the avant-garde had been exhausted, unlike his, by the machinery of self-promotion. Or so they say. Chroniclers of the scene deemed her return a retreat, whether under the banner of emotional breakdown or career meltdown. 'She wore herself out.' 'She overplayed her hand.' 'She sold out.' 'She lost her mind.' The explanations tend to arrive in the form of epithets. And then there is another theory. She was sick and tired of war, burnt out on Vietnam, disillusioned by the failure of the era's utopian project of pacifism and liberation. Her departure was an act of political protest as much as of emotional surrender." —Mignon Nixon excerpted from Yayoi Kusama. | GIFTS FOR GRADS 2013: 50 Perfect Choices for Recent Graduates!  |
| | | Yayoi KusamaEdited by Frances Morris. Text by Jo Applin, Juliet Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Midori Yamamura. | Accompanying the first major American retrospective exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work, and an exhibition at Tate Modern in London, this volume offers a definitive monograph on Japan's most famous living artist. It features a wealth of works from all periods in Kusama's career, as well as essays by various international curators and critics, discussing Kusama's years in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and the psychoanalytic import of her art. Kusama's originality, innovation and sheer drive to make art have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades, encompassing painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance, installation and even product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York, and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city, becoming close with artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, and influencing many others along the way. It was in these years that Kusama was dubbed "the Polka Dot Princess," for her obsessive use of polka dots in installations and happenings. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition that she has recently achieved. Now in her ninth decade, Kusama's imagination remains fertile and productive, as she continues to devise dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-paints her ongoing series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She left Japan for New York at the age of 28, following a correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, and was soon participating in the city's 1960s wave of happenings and avant-garde activities. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and began writing surrealistic novels and poetry. On November 12, 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.Featured images, reproduced from Yayoi Kusama, are: an undated photograph of the artist on one of her late-60s Accumulation pieces, a detail from "Yellow Trees" (1994), "Flower Bud No. 6" (1952), "Accumulation" (c. 1963), "Eyes of Mine" (2010), and "Kusama Fashion, New York" (1970). | Cory Reynolds | Date: 7/15/2012 D.A.P. Publishing is pleased to have published Yayoi Kusama, the definitive exhibition catalog published to accompany the Whitney Museum of American Art's current retrospective of the artist's work, on view through September 30 and reviewed in the July 13 issue of The New York Times, in which Holland Cotter concluded, "there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment over the long haul. Her Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation sculptures are deservedly classics of global stature; her Japanese work of the 1940s and early 1970s are treasures still underknown. They are things to seek out and dwell on." Please scroll down for a selection of spreads from the book. continue to blog
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| | I Want to Keep on Living, But …
From within the radiantly shining sky,
appear quietly my infinitely earnest wishes for
finding the truth.
From the end of the universe, they have finally come out
to talk to the dead and the living.
With my heart filled with emotions,
I say now from the bottom of my heart
with tears welled up in my eyes.
A wish for a great life that has supported me
in this dizzying world of people filled with glittering love and hope.
And a deep sense of love and hate, and of sorrow and despair
that reverberates through the end of the universe.
Placed in between these, and between abundant human love,
and celebration and love of humanity,
I accumulate hopes for a living.
In the midst of this despair,
I wonder if I can still live tomorrow.
Shall I ask my heart everyday for an answer.
From time to time, and with utmost sincerity.
Yayoi Kusama, October 6, 2010
Reproduced from Yayoi Kusama | |
|  | YAYOI KUSAMA
Edited by Frances Morris. Text by Jo Applin, Juliet Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Midori Yamamura.
D.A.P./TATE
ISBN: 9781935202813 | US $49.95
Pub Date: 2/29/2012
Active | In stock
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|  | YAYOI KUSAMA
Essays by Karola Grässlin and Jan Verwoert.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883758299 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 6/15/2004
Out of print | Not available
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|  | LOVE FOREVER: YAYOI KUSAMA, 1958-1968
Texts by Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, Lynn Zelevansky
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
ISBN: 9780875871813 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 4/2/1998
Out of print | Not available
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