two chance meetings in
Kusama Yayoi
Love Forever
make your choice:
Galleries
of Yayoi photographs
Kusama Paintings
Yayoi and I first met in the Hague, Holland, in 1967. We struck up a good working relationship right away and had ourselves a nice spread in the long since defunct TIQ magazine. One of these photos, really a discard, turned up in the great 1998 Kusama exhibition (Museum of Modern Art, New York) where I stumbled over it on my first visit to MoMA. A weird experience!
FEATURE DOCUMENTARY WORK-IN-PROGRESS
YAYOI KUSAMA BOOKS
After all these years!
Thanks mainly to the efforts of Mattijs Visser, 0-INSTITUTE, for the first time a book has been published with my by now half-a-century old photographs; and also with my text describing our first meeting and the months she spent as a houseguest of Willy and me in Scheveningen, Holland.
There's also an article by Margriet Schavemaker of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, plus Kusama photographs from New York, made by Raoul van den Boom.
cover photo Raoul van den Boom
Love Forever
or Kusama's story told by Harrie Verstappen
The book costs €19.50 plus S/H and is available from
MER. Borgerhoff & Lamberigts
0-Institute has also published limited editions of some of my Kusama photographs.
I never made a big deal out of exhibitions showing my Kusama photos, mainly because I considered my input as very modest.
Other people, I found out, look at this in a different way, so here goes:
2021-04-22 to 09-1 Gropius Bau, Berlin:
Yayoi Kusama
A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe
A Zoom interview with me on my Kusama period can be accessed at the Gropius Bau site.
Harrie Verstappen interview
©opyright Problems
I do not want to say too much about this, for several reasons; one of which is that it hurts. Kusama Yayoi has made a lawyer send me a letter advising me that she claimed ©opyright on all those photos which I took of her. At first and second sight, this is totally risible and in contradiction of Dutch and Japanese laws. In fact, I now find that Kusama Studios have been publishing our so-called "Joint Works" all over the world, without paying me compensation and in the process damaging my professional standing by witholding my name as co-author.
The last word has not been said about this.
What I do wish to say is, I'm pretty sad about this.
more work by Harrie Verstappen
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