Yayoi Kusama Dies, News Delayed by 13 Days

As a young girl in the Japanese city of Matsumoto, Yayoi Kusama once looked at a tablecloth patterned with red flowers, and soon began seeing that same pattern everywhere around her: on the ceiling, on windows, on pillars, even across her own body. Those were the first in a lifelong series of hallucinations and patterned fields that had followed her since early childhood and would go on to become the central motif of her entire body of work. That girl grew up to become one of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and word of her death did not reach the public until August 27, 2026, thirteen days after she actually died.

The announcement was made that day by Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. on the artist’s official website, stating that Kusama died on August 14 in a hospital in Tokyo.

“It is with profound sorrow that we announce Yayoi Kusama passed away in a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97,” the statement from Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. read.

Sources disagree on her exact age: the official statement and Serbian broadcaster RTS give her age as 97, while the Serbian outlet Nova.rs reports she was 98. They also disagree on the cause of death, RTS cites multiple organ failure, while the studio’s own statement does not mention a cause at all.

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, in Nagano Prefecture, into a family that was unsupportive of her artistic ambitions. Her parents told her that pursuing painting would bring shame on the family, and even her attempts to study painting in Kyoto found no backing at home. She still left for New York in 1957, and through the 1960s became a central figure of its avant-garde scene, exhibiting during the same period as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

What set her apart from that generation was not just the motif itself but where it came from. Kusama’s dots and patterned fields were never a stylistic choice, they were an attempt to externalize what she had been seeing inside her own mind since childhood, which is why critics have spent decades debating whether the repetition in her work is a decorative device or a therapeutic method she used to manage her own anxiety. Both readings sit side by side in her work, and that is likely why the dots and pumpkins, the most cheerful-looking part of her output, start to feel unsettling the moment you look at them for more than a few seconds.

She returned to Japan in 1973, and in 1977 voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she remained for the rest of her life. She kept a studio across the street from the hospital and went there almost every day, funding it by selling her own work. She created her first Infinity Mirror Room back in 1965, and decades later, in the age of social media, the installation became a phenomenon that drew lines around the block and millions of visitors to galleries worldwide, while her polka-dotted pumpkins turned into an almost universally recognized signature. One of her paintings sold in 2022 for around $10.5 million, and Tokyo’s Shinjuku district is home to an entire five-story museum dedicated to her.

The same statement from her studio also notes that Kusama kept painting until her final days.

“She painted until her final days, never putting down her brush,” the statement said.

A retrospective of her work, which has already traveled through Switzerland and Germany, opens at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on September 11 as a posthumous tribute, while the exhibition “One with Eternity” remains on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum through March. Kusama leaves behind a body of work in which mass-produced decoration and personal anguish were never truly separate, and it is that inseparability, not the number of tickets sold for her mirror rooms, that she will be remembered for.

“We will continue to fulfill Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world,” her studio said.