Yayoi Kusama

What failed

Her mother took her materials away to stop her making art, and her parents objected outright to the career. In New York through the 1960s she produced constantly and was widely noticed, but she had no gallery and no dealer while better-represented peers built on the same ideas. She turned up uninvited at the 1966 Venice Biennale, laid out fifteen hundred mirrored spheres outside the Italian pavilion and offered them at two dollars each; the organisers shut the sale down. Her performances shamed her family badly enough that her old school removed her name from its alumni list. In 1973, facing sustained critical hostility and no money, she left New York for good — and was then largely written out of the record for sixteen years.

What happened next

Retrospectives in New York and Oxford in 1989 began the rediscovery. In 1993 she officially represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, twenty-seven years after turning up at it uninvited. She died in August 2026, having spent her last three decades as one of the most widely seen artists in the world.

The point

The gap between having her sale stopped at the Biennale and representing her country at it was twenty-seven years. She spent most of it in obscurity and the last forty-nine years of her life living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital, working every day.