BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.75 x 10.75 in. / 208 pgs / 195 color / 51 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/29/2012 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 11
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781935202813TRADE List Price: $49.95 CDN $60.00
AVAILABILITY Not available
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE
London, England Tate Modern, 02/09/12-06/05/12
New York Whitney Museum, 7/12/12-9/30/12
"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."
Published by D.A.P./Tate Edited 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 image, an undated photograph of the artist on one of her late-60s Accumulation pieces, is reproduced from Yayoi Kusama
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New York Times
Dana Jennings
Ms. Kusama was born in the Japanese hinterlands in 1929, and the one big question that’s clear in her work is this: How does an artist blossom in the wake of World War II? For Ms. Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known artists, the answer was a sharp turn toward sometimes barely decipherable inscapes. She says she makes art “that does battle at the boundary between life and death.” In series like Self-Obliteration and Infinity Net it seems that she would like nothing better than to evanesce into eternity.
ARTnews
William Feaver
Looking back, Kusama is an early example of an artist whose contribution is, essentially, a globalization of output. These works need no translation nor do they demand prolonged looking. Essentially they are mass displays of catchy stuff, ranging from airmail labels collaged by the hundred to phalli cast by the thousand, upstaged eventually by quite startling mirror mazes.
W Magazine
Nobuyoshi Araki
In Japan, she was regarded as "the queen of scandal," the critic Tatehata said, and not as a major artist. Yet she continued to create art, enlisting fellow hospital patients to assist her. The refurbishment of her reputation began with small exhibitions in Tokyo of the exquisite collages she made with magazine clippings that Cornell had given her. But her rediscovery on a larger stage dates from the pioneering 1989 exhibition in New York that was organized by Munroe at the short-lived Center for International Contemporary Arts.
V Magazine
Patrik Sandberg
"The inescapable theme of infinity floods her work and finds its psychedelic way into the heart of even the most jaded of mainstream critics. Infinite and indispensible."
New York Magazine
Carl Swanson
"Kusama's is a wonderful behind-the-music story, the outsider, with destiny in her sights, who moves to the big city to prove herself, then collapses under the strain of striving, only to stage a comeback, bigger than ever."
Newsweek
Robin Givhan
Kusama, who grew up in rural Japan, first entered the spotlight in the 1960s--a bold splash of psycyhadelia landing in a New York art milieu dominated by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol…She established a reputation for art happenings choreographed with nude performers, soft-form penis sculptures, and dots. Dots were her thing-beguiling, surreal, mysterious. The dots, she says in her accented English, are "my medicine--my personal medicine. From my childhood, I [saw] the polka dots… [and] people talked about [my art with] the polka dots…" For her triumphant return to New York, Kusama, a diminutive woman, wore a Technicolor red wig, a black dress spattered with red dots, polka-dot sunglasses, and myriad other dotted accessories from [Louis] Vuitton.
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
FROM THE BOOK
"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.
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FORMAT: Hbk, 8.75 x 10.75 in. / 208 pgs / 195 color / 51 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9781935202813 PUBLISHER: D.A.P./Tate AVAILABLE: 2/29/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: *not available
Published by D.A.P./Tate. Edited 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.
