Yayoi Kusama’s death at 97 is being seen both as the loss of a global art icon and as the closing of a career shaped by early dismissal, mental-health struggles and a stubborn refusal to stop making work. Accounts agree on her eventual worldwide stature, while differing in whether they foreground her avant-garde politics, her personal history or the mass appeal of her installations.

The artist’s fame arrived on a scale few could have predicted when she left Japan for New York in 1958. Her mirror rooms and pumpkins later drew enormous audiences, but the same reports stress that recognition followed decades in which her experiments sat uneasily with the art establishment.

Kusama’s studio announced that she died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August after continuing to paint until her final days. It described a life “devoted entirely to artistic creation” across visual art, performance, fiction and poetry, and said her work would continue to offer “hope and strength for the future.”¹

One account places particular weight on the imbalance of her New York years: Kusama developed infinity-net paintings, soft sculptures and politically charged performances, yet believed ideas associated with her had been taken up by prominent male contemporaries while she was left out of art history.¹ Another similarly contrasts her poorly received nude and phallic works with the later blockbuster success of Infinity Mirror Rooms, saying she returned to Japan with deteriorating mental health and entered a psychiatric facility where she could continue creating.²

The reports also differ in emphasis over her late-life public image. One presents social media and the selfie-era appeal of immersive installations as a route to a vast new audience; another notes that major museum shows, auction sales and luxury-brand collaborations made her a cultural fixture.³ Yet all trace her recurring dots, mirrored spaces and pumpkins to childhood hallucinations and a practice of turning what she saw into art. “Pumpkins speak to me,” Kusama said, calling them a source of “stability” and “peace of mind.”²

Her late recognition did not erase the earlier exclusion described in these accounts. Instead, it made the contrast central to her legacy: an artist once treated as marginal became one of contemporary art’s most recognisable figures.