At 82, Yayoi Kusama is still licking old wounds. In her new memoir, she recounts the insult of a photographer who interviewed her in 1970 and then never thanked her or printed her name in the article. She accuses Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras and Andy Warhol of copying her ideas, which were “decades ahead of their time.” She embellishes that she was almost as famous as Jackie O. and President Nixon in the ’60s. And she bemoans how participants in her free-love Happenings were so cultishly fixated on her that they begged for sex and would beat up any other suitors.

Yet Kusama remains a mostly sympathetic character in Infinity Net, published in 2002 and translated into English in time for her new retrospective at the Tate Modern, Feb. 9-June 5, 2012. Her international stature was more than hard-won and she’s forthcoming about her weaknesses. Even when the book starts to feel dead in your hands -- bloated by ego and cold from Kusama's obsession with the accumulations of an internal scrapbook -- there's no shortage of page-turning grist.

The book follows the artist from her repressive childhood in Japan to New York, where, despite having no connections, she fell in with an influential crowd that included Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Joseph Cornell, her companion of over a decade -- sort of. “I disliked sex and he was impotent, so we suited each other very well,” was how she once put it to Artforum.

Kusama had an awakening in the late 1950s when she discovered her now trademark polka-dot. She was struck by how the dot seemed like a particle of matter which, when replicated endlessly, created a new kind of universe. The motif first appeared in her giant, hypnotically repetitious “Infinity Net” series of monochromes shown at Brata Gallery in 1959. “This was my ‘epic,’ summing up all that I was,” she writes. (In 2008, one of the “Infinity Net” paintings sold for $5.8 million at Christie’s, the third most expensive work at auction by ...