Yayoi Kusama

Art's rarest and most powerful quality may be its ability to embody the interior landscape of an artist, approximating psychological intricacies that could be only conveyed through visual models and metaphors. Exemplifying this is the vibrant work of 85-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, known best in America for her obsessive abstract paintings, immersive sculptural installations, and polka-dot body-painting performances realized during a prolific period in New York City from 1958-1973, an era bridging abstract expressionism with the heyday of avant-garde experimentalism.

Kusama's most recent retrospective, organized by the Tate Modern in London and making its last stop now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, does not disappoint for lack of iconic works from that golden NYC period: One gallery is dedicated to Kusama's obsessively painted Infinity Net paintings (outsize canvases covered entirely with small and white, scalloped brushstrokes) from 1959–61, while another room showcases her dizzyingly wrought Compulsion Furniture (Accumulation) from the early 1960s, in which she affixed hundreds of fabric-sewn, tubular forms to common household objects — ultimately creating a roomful of Pop sculptures personifying a fully furnished and compulsive psychic interior. Another room is devoted to Self Obliteration — a psychedelic film which mashes up images of Kusama's paintings and installations with many of her 1967 performances: scenes follow the artist riding a polka-dotted horse through upstate New York, painting spots on a pond's surface, or — cutting back to the city — directing orgiastic body-painting parties, held inside her own installations of mirrored walls and blinking lights.

Nearby, a gallery of posters, and other ephemera underscore Kusama's cultural importance of the day. As illustrated through newspaper articles and art-magazine clippings, she was a major player in the male-dominated art scene, making a splash alongside artists like Allan Kaprow (sharing headlines with his "Happenings"), and Claes Oldenburg (who, at the time of Kusama's Compulsion Furniture, was famous for crafting soft sculptures of domestic items: his, a deflated bathtub, or a giant fan). Donald Judd was her upstairs studio neighbour and among her earliest friends in Manhattan, while assemblage artist Joseph Cornell (though three decades her senior) became her adoring boyfriend. Letters on view lend insight into female figures too: handwritten correspondences from Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, respond to Kusama's own questions seeking art-world advice from an older woman artist. While making gender-defying strides in the art sphere, Kusama was breaking political ground too: a press release from 1968 details a gay marriage she orchestrated at her downtown venue, The Church of Self-Obliteration.

What makes this retrospective different from Kusama's previous exhibitions to date is that the survey extends beyond her heralded NYC period, spanning six decades of artmaking to include her very early and most august works. On view upon entry is an installation of precocious paintings Kusama made in her hometown of Matsumoto, in which the traditionally-trained artist experimented with Western art's themes of the day. Most notable are Lingering Dream (1949), a surrealist oil painting reminiscent of the jagged, somnambulist landscapes of Max Ernst, and in wispy ink drawings with titles like The Germ and The Tree from 1952, which echo the linear lyricism of Joan Miró and Paul Klee.

Bookending the show at its exit, meanwhile, are bold, hallucinatory paintings with unhinged titles like All About my Love, and I Long to Eat a Dream of the Night or I Want to Live Honestly, Like the Eye in the Picture. These the artist made in the past decade, while living in a mental institution. (In 1977, just a few years after leaving America for Japan, Kusama — plagued with panic attacks and visions — willingly checked herself into a Tokyo facility, where she continues to live and create work to this day.) These works, though less inspired than Kusama's early paintings, are still a testament to a tireless lifetime of creation.

For those lucky enough to enter, the highlight of the exhibition is Fireflies on the Water (2002) — a dazzling and immersive installation in the first-floor gallery, which as dictated by Kusama, can only be viewed by one person at a time (for that reason each museum visitor must book a one-minute appointment). The payoff is worth the effort: A closed room with four walls of mirrors, a reflecting-pool ground, and 150 lights dangling from the ceiling like glowing silkworms, seem to expand space at all angles, allowing a glimpse of infinity.

Kusama's oeuvre is a pure delight to observe, despite her paradoxically distressed inner life. Her career — as shown here through a beguiling progression of work — is a true testament to the alchemical potential of art. Emily Weiner