Focus on Yayoi Kusama
[12 Aug 2014]
The work of the Japanese queen of polka dots, who is now 85, has never been so much in demand. Yayoi Kusama is in fact the most expensive living female artist in the world, and the third highest ranked Japanese artist behind Takashi Murakami and Tsuguharu Fujita. Born in Matsumoto (Nagano) in 1929, Yayoi Kusama has managed to promote her eccentric and psychedelic universe all over the world.
The non-conformism of the Japanese artist is notorious worldwide. Her obsession with dots originated from what she describes as a “vision”. When she was ten years old Yayoi KUSAMA saw the floral design of the family table-cloth escape from the table and invade all the surfaces around her including the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and… her mind. This hallucination apparently became recurrent and Yayoi developed a fear of self-dissolution: “a dot lost among thousands of other dots”. Drawing being an excellent means of escape from hallucinations, the child starting drawing on a regular basis and subsequently studied Japanese painting at the Hiyoshigaoka Graduate School in the mid 1940s. Immediately attracted to more open Western art, after several exhibitions in Japan, the young artist arrived in New York aged 28 and joined the city’s flamboyant underground. Working with large formats she also painted dots on human bodies during performances. Fairly soon Kusama found herself the era’s avant-garde and her work was exhibited alongside Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Spotted (no pun intended) by Donald Judd, she moved in above his studio and published her Obliteration manifesto in 1960. The 60s was a brilliant period in New York for Yayoi Kusama and she was recognized as one of the most creative artists of the new art scene. She returned to Japan in the early 70s and voluntarily shut herself into a mental hospital in Tokyo. With access to an on-site workshop, she pursued her dots obsession, which became increasingly controlled and mastered. Her dots started appearing on floors, ceilings, walls, clothing, videos, installations, fashion, sculptures and upholstered fabric. She subsequently introduced sets of mirrors that multiplied the image and annihilated the boundaries.
Since the early 2000s, Kusama has received numerous awards, collaborated with luxury brands (Louis Vuitton Max Jacobs, Lancôme), exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and enjoyed major retrospectives at the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York. Concurrent with this strong newsflow, her price index has soared by 400% since 2000. Over the last ten years, her index has risen unabated (+177% between January 2004 and January 2014) and her 2013 auction turnover total amounted to $28.3 million, an unprecedented peak, up 38% on 2012 which was also a high for the artist ($20 million vs. $14 million in 2011).
In fact Yayoi Kusama already generated excellent results when her works first hit the auction market: in 1992 a large canvas entitled Ocean (1960, 177.8 cm x 269.2 cm) fetched twice its high estimate producing a result above $50,000 at Sotheby’s in New York (November 11, 1993). Ten years later, her work crossed the $100,000 threshold (No. G, 1959, 101 cm x 128.9 cm, fetched $195,000, at Sotheby’s New York on November 13, 2002) and then the $200,000 threshold in 2004. After that, her prices soared and some earlier buyers sold, sometimes pocketing million-dollar profits (e.g. with No. Red Q which sold for $70,000 on November 18, 1998 at Sotheby’s and fetched $1.2m on May 11, 2010 at Christie’s). In 2005, she crossed the million-dollar threshold and since then eleven of her works have generated 7-figure results including her current auction record of $5.1m for No. 2, a painting with white dots on a white background – a rain of hallucinated particles almost three meters wide – created in 1959 (Christie’s, New York, on November 12, 2008). With that record of $ .1m, Kusama is in 34th place in the ranking of global auction results for living artists, and 1st place among women artists (after 33 men…).
Yayoi Kusama’s market – which is fairly evenly divided between East and West (40% of turnover in the United States, versus 25% in Japan and 16% in Hong Kong) – is active almost everywhere on the auction globe including Austria, Taiwan, Italy, England, France and Singapore. Many of her works (half in fact) sell for less than $8,000. Collectors have a preference for paintings (nearly 96% of her auction turnover comes from 38% of her transactions) even if her sculptures are also highly rated (15% of turnover from 8% of transactions). No three-dimensional work – i.e. sculpture or installation – has yet reached a million dollars; but the half-a-million threshold has been crossed twelve times, including three times for her big yellow fiber-glass pumpkins covered with black spots. Smaller pumpkins in resin have also been mass produced and they go for around $6,000. Her screen-printed cushions, which fetch roughly $1,000 each, are clearly striving to emancipate themselves from their status as “derivative objects”.