Born in Matsumoto-shi, Nagano-Ken, Japan, Yayoi Kusama became a colorful personality in the New York art world of the 1960s and has been described as an "outsider, eccentric, an obsessive, a femme fatale and a nonentity"

Her paintings reflect childhood hallucinations, and her art has been an attempt to exorcise those demons. In the late 1950s, she began a series of Infinity Net Paintings that reflected with dots, nets and flowers her childhood affliction of suffering from repetitive hallucinations.

In the early 1960s when she first gained attention, she covered many of her canvases with webs and spots and created "compulsion" furniture with stuffed phallic protuberances. These experiments with soft...