"Yayoi Kusama: Eternity of Eternal Eternity" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, presents the "late" style of the internationally renowned artist.

The works are nearly all new — the product of a surge of activity from 2004 that resulted in two series: "Love Forever" and "My Eternal Soul." They are far tamer than her early works from the late 1950s, when she covered furniture in protruding soft phalluses and staged nude happenings, such as that of 1969 at the Rockefeller Garden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Back then, as the artist explained, "I did body painting while my models f-cked a bronze sculpture by Maillol."

"Late" style is an awkward term, but it conjures up something of the supposed serenity the artist is finding in her work as the years accrue and death draws ever closer. Beset by obsessive neurosis since childhood and with an uncomprehending mother who beat and locked her in a storehouse as she struggled to bring her, often suicidal, hallucinations under control, Kusama found drawing and painting a way to mediate her internal turbulences. It did not help, however, that her family opposed her urge to create and often confiscated her materials so that she had to hide and work by candle light.