Yayoi Kusama made me curious in a way very few artists ever have, and for a long time the curiosity had almost nothing to do with the paintings. It was about the woman. About a child in Matsumoto who looked down at the family tablecloth and watched the pattern lift off the cloth and spread across the backs of her own hands, and who drew it, obsessively, because drawing it was the only way to get out in front of it. About what it costs to work for seventy years inside a mind that keeps trying to dissolve you, and what it means that she made the dissolving into the work.

She died on the fourteenth of August, in a hospital in Tokyo, at ninety-seven. Her studio announced it twelve days later and said she had gone on painting to the end, never putting the brush down. Nobody who followed her found that surprising. She had told the Associated Press years earlier, in that flat, childlike way she had of stating enormous things, that she would keep painting until she died.

Here is the part that gets flattened in every tribute, including the affectionate ones. The polka dot arrived as a symptom. She spent the next seventy years learning what to do with it.

She grew up in a house attached to her family's plant nursery, with a mother who tore up her drawings and wanted a conventional Japanese wife instead of whatever this was. The fields of dots she began seeing as a child did not stop when she looked away. She was frightened of them. She drew them, over and over, as a way of staying ahead of them. She said, near the end of her life, that art was the only reason she was still alive, and she meant it literally, which is different from how most artists mean it.

Then she posted her drawings to Georgia O'Keeffe, a stranger in New Mexico, and asked how a person becomes an artist in America. Then she went. She arrived in New York in the late fifties with a suitcase of work and no money and started painting the Infinity Nets: enormous canvases covered edge to edge in a single repeated loop of the brush, thousands of them, every inch as busy as every other inch, giving the eye nowhere to settle. Critics filed her under minimalism. She was painting a picture of her own mind and hoping somebody would recognise it.

Kusama built the Infinity Rooms to erase you. That is the stated intention and the plain effect of the work. She called the process self-obliteration: dissolve the individual into the pattern until there is no boundary between the person and the universe, which is a description of a hallucination as much as it is an artistic programme. She spent her life turning the terror of dissolving into something a stranger could walk into on purpose.

And we walk into it and we take a photograph of ourselves.

That reads like an indictment, and for a long time I let myself believe it was one. The room built to annihilate the self, colonised by the selfie. Tidy, shareable, and exactly the sort of observation that lets you feel superior to a queue you would happily have stood in.

Kusama is the one who wrecks it. She was the most sophisticated distributor of her own image the twentieth-century art world produced, and she had been at it since the sixties.

In 1966, uninvited, she installed fifteen hundred mirrored spheres on the lawn outside the Venice Biennale and sold them to passers-by for the price of a coffee until the organisers made her stop. She called it Narcissus Garden. She staged naked happenings in Central Park and painted dots on the bodies. She showed up in the orange wig and the matching dress and stood in front of her own paintings for the photographers, wearing the work, becoming the work, making the picture that would travel.

She had watched the men around her in New York take her ideas and collect the credit. The repeated image papering a room, the soft protruding sculpture: she saw those turn up on other walls under other names while she could barely make rent. She learned the lesson the art world teaches women in exactly one way, and protection was never the answer she reached for. She multiplied instead. Past the point where any of it could be lifted, past the point where the work could be mistaken for anybody else's.

Louis Vuitton had already run the experiment. Its 2003 collaboration with Takashi Murakami was reported to have generated somewhere near $350 million, roughly a tenth of annual turnover at the time. So when Marc Jacobs put Kusama's dots on the Speedy and the Neverfull in 2012, the year she was showing at the Whitney, the Tate and the Pompidou, it produced one of the most quoted brand partnerships in fashion history and a resale market that still charges a premium for it more than a decade on.

The sequel, in January 2023, was a different order of event. More than four hundred and fifty pieces across ready-to-wear, leather goods, fragrance and trainers. A Steven Meisel campaign with Gisele Bündchen and Christy Turlington. A staged rollout that opened in Japan and China on the first of January and reached all four hundred and sixty boutiques worldwide by the sixth. Launchmetrics put the media impact value at $15.4 million in the first week alone, and Vuitton was confident enough to flag the collection as a line item in its first-quarter numbers.

Then the buildings. An inflatable Kusama draped over the roof of the Champs-Élysées store with her hand reaching toward a window. A giant sculpture of her beside oversized mirrored balls in Tokyo. And on Fifth Avenue, in the window of the flagship, a life-size animatronic Kusama with cameras in her pupils, tracking pedestrians, smiling at them, lifting a brush to paint dots on the glass over and over for as long as the store was open.

Read one way, that robot is the most cynical object of the decade. A ninety-three-year-old woman in a Tokyo hospital, rendered as a machine, put to work selling handbags. Critics said so at the time and they were entitled to.

Read the way she spent her life teaching us to read, it is the most accurate portrait of her anybody has attempted. A body that cannot stop making the mark. Repetition without exhaustion or choice, staged in the busiest window in the world, watched by thousands of people who stopped and filmed it and sent it on. Self-obliteration and total saturation turned out to be the same strategy. Disappear into the pattern; make the pattern inescapable. You cannot lose a woman who is on ten thousand canvases, on a pumpkin on an island in the Seto Inland Sea, on a Capucines bag, on the outside of an aeroplane, in a museum with her name on it, in the phone of every person who ever queued for one of her rooms.

We talk about identity systems as though they were engineering. A mark, applied consistently, at scale, until recognition compounds. Kusama had the most efficient identity system anyone has ever built. One shape, infinitely repeatable, scaling from a brushstroke to a room to the façade of a building on the Champs-Élysées without losing a thing.

And it cannot be copied, because the mechanism was compulsion made public. The dot worked because she could not stop making it, and the not being able to stop was the whole content of the work. Every brand that has tried to reverse-engineer that kind of saturation has ended up with wallpaper. They chose their mark. Hers chose her.

This is the uncomfortable half, and I think it is the true one. What we respond to in her is the evidence of a person who had no choice, and who turned the thing that was going to destroy her into the thing that kept her alive, for seventy years, from a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo that she checked herself into in the seventies and never left, crossing the road to her studio most mornings and painting until it was dark.

She once described herself in a single breath as an artistic revolutionary and then, immediately, as someone frightened of everything, all the time. Both were operating. An obituary wants to resolve that into a single sentence. It was the engine.

At her 2013 show in Chelsea, people waited three hours in the December cold to be let into Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, and once inside they had forty-five seconds. That was the rule, posted and enforced. Black water underfoot, hundreds of small coloured lights suspended at different heights, your own body repeating outward until the walls stopped behaving like walls.

Forty-five seconds was never going to be long enough. The infinity in there belonged to her. It was the one she saw on the tablecloth as a child and could not switch off, and she spent nearly a century inside it. The most generous thing anyone has done in contemporary art was to build a door into that room so the rest of us could stand in it for a minute, and let us take the picture on the way out.