Rivers of love

The photograph shows two elderly people. One of them looks directly at the camera, dressed a sharply cut red wig and a matching red dress with black polka dots. The other figure, a modest smile on his lips, is in sober grey. It’s hard to think of two more unlikely characters. Nonetheless, Yayoi Kusama, world-famous artist, and Teruo Hirose, a doctor from the Bronx, forged a friendship that transcended their different lives, their wildly different personalities – and certainly their sense of dress.

Their paths first crossed in New York in the early 1960s, when Kusama went to visit Dr Hirose for medical treatment. Hirose was a noted cardiologist – he was part of the team credited with pioneering bypass surgery – but, by night, he dedicated himself to helping the Japanese community which, in the 1950s and 1960s, was small and with limited resources. Within this community, there were also a group of vibrant artists who had come to New York City to express their creativity and freedom away from the constraints of post-war Japan. Living here without health insurance and a support system, Dr. Hirose (who also treated the sculptor Isamu Noguchi), provided medical care to many Japanese artists often free of charge. Kusama first visited the doctor in 1960, when she was a struggling artist living downtown in a loft on little more than air. Not even Dr Hirose’s family know the reason for the appointments, as breaking patient confidentiality was (as his son says) one of his father’s red lines. Kusama made the trip to see Dr. Hirose, who was beginning to establish himself as a Japanese community doctor, first to Jackson Heights in Queens and then up to Riverdale in the West Bronx, on a regular basis, sometimes just for a social visit and often bringing a recent painting or work on paper to give to the doctor as a sign of their friendship.

Despite appearances, the pair did have one thing in common: they shared very ambivalent views about their home country, Japan, and had, from an early age, planned to find a way to leave it. The era in which they were both born played a part. Kusama was born in 1929, Hirose in 1926, a decade or so before the outbreak of the brutal Sino-Japanese war in which Japan invaded China. Although they were each from distinguished families – Kusama can trace a connection to the royal house, Dr Hirose to two dynasties of samurai – neither fitted into their country’s strict, proscriptive atmosphere and culture.

According to her autobiography, Infinity Net, Yayoi was a highly strung child who yearned to see lands beyond Japan. Always a believer in going straight to the top, she wrote to the President of France asking for help. She received a “kindly reply”, as she put it, from his office telling her she would first have to learn French, but even Kusama’s legendary persistence couldn’t help her with the knotty problems of the Future Conditional. With that plan on hold, she turned her attention to the US. Next target on her list was Georgia O’Keeffe, who wrote back not just once, but several times, and even invited her to stay.

Teruo and Yayoi – friends to the end

Yayoi Kusama (b.1929) Untitled, c. 1960 oil on canvas 43¾ x 51½in (111 x 130.8cm) Estimate: $2,500,000 - 3,500,000 (£1,900,000 - 2,700,000)

Teruo and Shigeko Hirose in New York City

It took eight years to persuade her mother to let her leave Japan, but eventually, in 1957, Kusama arrived in Seattle with no money, but everything she felt she needed to survive: 2,000 of her works on paper and 60 silk kimonos. These she felt would be her own currency.

Teruo Hirose also played a long game, although – unlike Yayoi – he had a blueprint for escape. His great uncle had worked in New York as a diplomat in the 1920s up until World War II and had instilled in his great nephew the idea of reaching America at all costs. Teruo, like Yayoi, was repulsed by the warmongering of the Japanese government and realised that his ticket to the US could be education. He chose medicine – with engineering, which was the other option, Teruo could have been sucked into the war machine. After graduating from medical school, he arrived in the US in 1953.

For all Japanese immigrants, it must have been hard to leave, but for Yayoi and Teruo being severed from the status of their families, in particular, must have been immensely tough. Yayoi describes arriving in New York as “hell on earth”, that the only way she could endure the cold and hunger was to paint. In this period, she had a compulsion to cover canvases with an intricate web of lines – “nets”, as she termed them. She describes in her autobiography how, once she had covered a canvas in nets, she would continue to paint them on the table, on the floor and then on her own body, until the nets “began to expand to infinity”. She writes, “I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room.” It was a period when she suffered from full-blown panic attacks that led to hospital. So she might have thought she was hallucinating when her pen pal Georgia O’Keeffe knocked on the door of the New York loft to find out if she was all right. O’Keeffe, who clearly felt that in Kusama she had found a kindred spirit, then did something even more helpful: she introduced the artist to Edith Halpert, the legendary gallerist, who bought one of Kusama’s works.

The early years in New York were especially difficult, but Donald Judd, for one, took notice. Writing about her works in 1959, he said, “The effect is both complex and simple… The total quality suggests an analogy to a large, fragile but vigorously carved grill or to a massive, solid lace.” Kusama described it as setting her “spirit free in the very chaos of the vacuum”. Two of the works that she gave to Dr Hirose, Hudson River (1960) and Mississippi River (1960) – to be offered in Bonhams’ Hirose Collection Sale in New York in May – are from this groundbreaking time. Kusama traces the idea of the river back to her childhood where she would gaze at tiny pebbles “each individually verifiable” and yet part of a current that gradually gathers unstoppable force. But what is particular about these works – which have never been on public display since they were given to Dr Hirose – is that, unlike the majority of Kusama’s net paintings, which are painted in ethereal white, these are an earthy, magnetic red. Because there is no fixed point of perspective, the works draw the eye in and gradually the dots that initially appear equal and part of a universe stretching to infinity, take on their own singular presence. They at once embrace and surround, they are tangible and yet on the brink of dissolving. It is as if the eye is an element that is being immersed and tumbled about in water.

In 1960, Kusama had a breakthrough. It was an exhibition at the Brata Gallery, an unimposing space on 10th Street where one had to step through slumped humanity lying in the alleyway. This was downtown New York as opposed to the polite salons of the Upper East Side art world. This was also the year in which she met Dr Hirose and his wife, Shigeko, and their three-year-old son. He first remembers Kusama coming to their house in Riverdale, where they had moved from Queens. West Bronx was a cut above, and it received something of a national exodus of the Japanese community as families became more successful. The house was acquired specifically so that Dr Hirose had room for both his medical practice and his family. “It was the American dream,” as Dr Hirose’s son puts it. “He wasn’t a flashy person, but there is a picture of him with his first gold Cadillac. It was about celebrating the moment.”

Most of Dr Hirose’s patients from the Japanese community were strait-laced professionals – indeed, Hirose was himself the company doctor for Canon – but he felt it was very important also to support those who did not fit into any company structure, perhaps because he had turned his back on the restrictive culture in Japan. Dr Hirose quickly became renowned throughout New York’s Japanese community as the go-to guy. It was through this network that Kusama found herself in Dr Hirose’s surgery. “I’m sure they had an instant connection,” says Teruo’s son. “Artists who visited the house were given a special place of privilege. But there was another key factor – that was my mother.”

Yayoi Kusama (b.1929) Flower Petal, 1953 oil, gouache and pastel on paper 13¼ x 12½in (33.6 x 31.75cm) Estimate: $50,000 - 70,000 (£35,000 - 50,000)

According to him, Shigeko Hirose, who had been a nursing assistant, always felt an outsider in the US. “She never really assimilated, and I think that gave her a strong bond with Kusama – together with the fact that Shigeko made art. It was her therapy and a way of clasping on to her identity. My mother wasn’t judgemental. She was a kind, sweet person and a wonderful listener. I think that’s what Yayoi appreciated.” He remembers Kusama from a young age. “I remember her drawing with her – she just suggested, you know, squiggling and things like that. At that time, no one knew a lot about her.”

The son of Dr Hirose, who grew up to be a professor of photography, was very attracted to the window Yayoi opened for him into the counterculture. He remembers a landmark moment when his father took him to a happening downtown. “Yayoi was having a party, and I’m not sure my dad quite understood what sort of event it would be. But I remember the moment when she opened the door and… well, there were a lot of very underdressed young men and women. I was ten. I wandered off from the crowd and went into a revolving room with mirrors and a bed inside. I loved that. I also found this amazing-looking chair with lots of projectile pieces which I promptly sat on. The next time I saw it was in the collection at the Whitney. Yes, thinking about it, I’m not sure my dad was very comfortable at that party…”.

He says that, despite his father being a celebrated scientist and writer– Teruo frequently appeared on Japanese TV as a medical expert – with an outwardly austere appearance, he understood, respected and above all admired Yayoi for her drive and ambition, for being as single-minded as he was.

Kusama closed the chapter on her adventures in the US in 1975, returning to Japan. Her artistic career had been transformed since she first met Dr Hirose, but she did come back to New York on a number of occasions for the opening of her exhibitions. Teruo was always invited. And the last time Teruo’s son saw Kusama, “she wouldn’t let go of my hand. She talked of how she remembered me as a baby in my mother’s arms and how I hid under the table as a toddler. It was as if the memories of my family, which had little connection with her life as an artistic rock star, had been a source of comfort, a way back to the years when she was struggling. And, of course, she has been a constant in my life. I grew up with her works – the watercolours and paintings which were proudly displayed by my parents throughout our house. My mother died in 1973, when I was 16, and I often wonder what she would have thought if she’d seen how Yayoi’s story turned out.”

Lucinda Bredin is Editor of Bonhams Magazine

The way they were Dr Teruo Hirose (1926-2019)

The way they were Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)