The Inextricable Art Lives of Georgia O’Keeffe and Yayoi Kusama

For centuries, women the world over have found and held on to each other, keeping each other afloat in rocky, adversarial seas. Through this kind of kinship, through shows of sisterhood, they have burned brighter than they would have alone, whether in the fields of politics, or music, or science. A sphere that was equally as fraught? The 20th century modern art world, which was dominated by men and subject to pressures from all fronts: financial, economic and social.

For Japanese multidisciplinary artist Yayoi Kusama, one of the most eminent artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, it was the ephemeral, encouraging influence of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the most notable American painters in history, that would change the trajectory of her career. 

Hero Image: Artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism. Photograph: Tony Vaccaro/Getty

Kusama, now known for her large-scale installations and her unabashed love of audacious prints and polka dots, began creating art in the 1950s. When she was beginning her career, she looked to one of her idols in the art world and one of the greatest artists of her time: the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Kusama first came across O’Keeffe’s work — its sensual oil-painted flowers; its clean, stark depictions of the natural world — through an illustration in a book she found in a secondhand bookshop in her hometown of Matsumoto. 

So, she wrote to O’Keeffe and sent her 14 of her watercolour paintings. “I’m only on the first step on the long and difficult life of being a painter,” Kusama wrote. “Will you kindly show me the way?”

And to her surprise, O’Keeffe responded — and what she wrote instilled within Kusama the courage to leave Japan for the US to pursue her art making. “After seeing her paintings in this book, I wrote to her. She responded with great kindness and generosity. Her letter gave me the courage I needed to leave for New York,” Kusama told The Guardian. The letter itself, dated 4 December 1955 is housed in Britain’s Tate. In it, O’Keeffe counsels Kusama on the difficulty of taking up such a profession, but encourages her nonetheless: “Show your art to everyone you can,” she writes. 

Letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Yayoi Kusama, 4 December 1955. Courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

So, Kusama arrived in New York in 1958. Meanwhile, O’Keeffe was living in New Mexico. What could have become a traditional, hierarchical mentoring relationship — as often exists in the art world, between student and teacher, between the learner and the scholar — turned into something less typical. More fruitful, less structured, and with a healthy amount of mutual admiration and respect. 

“Of all the many remarkable people I have known in my life, the first I must mention is Georgia O’Keeffe,” Kusama told the Tate. “If she had not so kindly answered my clumsy and reckless letter to her, I am not sure I would ever have made it to America. She was my first and greatest benefactor; it was because of her that I was able to go to the USA and begin my artistic career in earnest.”

1965 Lying on the base of My Flower Bed (1962) Photo: Peter Moore © Northwestern University © YAYOI KUSAMA

1965: Infinity Mirror Rooms, Phallis Field, installation view in the exhibition floor show, Richard Castellane Gallery, New York © YAYOI KUSAMA

Once she was settled in New York, Kusama received a telephone call from O’Keeffe saying, “I’m on my way”. Ten minutes later, Kusama’s long-time idol was at her front door. “I wanted to get a photo of us together, but my camera was out of film and there was no time to go out and buy a new roll,” Kusama says. “So I missed my chance. How I regret that now!”

In their one time meeting, O’Keeffe was sensitive and considerate of Kusama, considerate of how she was settling into the city as a new arrival. She also invited her to New Mexico. This was notable particularly because, like Kusama, O’Keeffe was a solitary artist, not known for her predilection for socialisation. 

Kusama found great comfort in the support of O’Keeffe, who she considered “one of the great artists.” This came in the form of guidance and care, but also in material terms. In the ‘60s, as Kusama was still striving for recognition in New York, she convinced her dealer to purchase several works “in order to help Kusama stave off financial hardship.” Kusama, meanwhile, was taken by the way she observed O’Keeffe living her life and making her art, in opposition to everything that surrounded her. “She possessed a certain genuine and deeply embedded spirituality,” she writes of O’Keeffe. “And it is largely to this that I attribute her greatness.” 

Yayoi Kusama, pictured in her Shinjuku studio. Photograph by Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos

While the pair share little aesthetic similarity or commonalities in technique, their alignment was always on worldview. O’Keeffe created pieces that told a story from the woman’s gaze in an art world full of lauded men — Pollock, Rothko, Hopper — and it was this that impacted Kusama’s trajectory, too. From O’Keeffe, she saw courage in the face of contest, and the value of audacity in creation. These, beyond form and colour and stroke, would turn out to be the most important lessons.