‘Yayoi Kusama Was the Avant-Garde Radical Who Became a Pop Icon’ by Blake Gopnik
August 26, 2026
On June 4, 1962, the Green Gallery in New York opened the most prophetic group of shows. It gave Andy Warhol his earliest exposure as a pop artist, with an image of dollar bills that was his first silk-screened work. In front of that lay a featureless gray slab by the sculptor Robert Morris; it counts as one of the first examples of minimalism. And off to one side was a sofa that the New York Times’s review said had “broken out frighteningly in what looks like thousands of blanched frankfurters.”
They were cloth penises, in fact, unmentionable in the era’s press, and they worked as one of the first great 1960s provocations of Yayoi Kusama, whose death at the age of 97 was announced on Thursday.
In her long life, she achieved something I’m not sure I’ve come across elsewhere: two very different moments of stardom, almost as though she’d been two different artists.
Read more at The New York Times.
