YAYOI KUSAMA
Pumpkin, 1990 
Acrylic on canvas
72.5 x 60.5 cm (28.5 x 23.9 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 1990 on the reverse

Provenance
Gallery Te, Tokyo
Acquired from the above by the present owner

 

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 27 April 2022
HKD 30,625,000

Source: Sotheby’s
Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Pumpkin 南瓜 | Contemporary Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

Executed in 1990, Pumpkin is a spellbinding, flawlessly executed archetype from Yayoi Kusama’s oeuvre – a testament to her astonishing dedication to creation, technique, and a singular artistic vision. Full and symmetrical, the pumpkin of the present work is a splendid example of her most favored motif. In the background, Kusama’s all-over scaled tessellations – an iconic iteration of the artist’s most distinctive infinity net motif employed often within her pumpkin paintings – are so tightly and dexterously woven that the canvas hums with the rhythmic intensity of the pattern. The pumpkin itself, anthropomorphic and brilliantly luminous, presents the legendary artist at the height of her powers: each gleaming circle shimmers and vibrates; each meticulously crafted row of multi-striated dots throbs and slithers fluidly down the body of the gourd.

One of the most recognisable icons in contemporary art today, Kusama’s pumpkin is deeply central to the artist’s psyche, and its origins within her art can be traced back to her most early years. In 1948, three years after the war ended, a 19-year-old Kusama enrolled in a fourth-year course at Kyoto City Senior High School of Art. “During my time in Kyoto I diligently painted pumpkins”, wrote the artist, “which in later years would become an important theme in my art” (Kusama Yayoi, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Tate Publishing, 2011, p. 75). Kusama recalls having consumed the vegetable endlessly to the point of nausea in her childhood years during and after the war; in spite of this, she retains a fond attachment to its organic bulbous form, describing it as embodying a “generous unpretentiousness” and “solid spiritual balance” (Ibid., p. 76). Already experiencing hallucinations at the time, involving pumpkins that spoke to her in a most animated manner, Kusama found the gourd a benign and nurturing subject – as opposed to the more traumatic and menacing feelings she associates with flowers, plants and objects that plagued her throughout her life.

Kusama’s early pumpkins were painted with traditional Nihonga materials, which she left behind after her move from Matsumoto to New York in 1958. Within only eighteen months of her arrival, Kusama stunned the New York art scene with her radical Infinity Nets in 1959, executed in the Western medium of oil, which were followed by her Accumulation soft sculptures in 1961. In 1965 Kusama infused explosions of color into her sculptures through the use of dotted and striped fabrics; by this time, the sheer breadth, scale and ambition of her diverse cross-media oeuvre had taken over the city like an epidemic. Her ubiquitous polka-dot and net motifs, manifested in mesmeric paintings, immersive rooms, hypnotic installations, body art and participatory performances, forged a wholly unique aesthetic that articulated a rigorous, overwhelming language of obsession and obliteration – a language that enabled the artist to combat her hallucinatory mental illness. The artist reflects: “I use my complexes and fears as subjects. I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this ‘obliteration’” (Kusama Yayoi, cited in Mignon Nixon, ‘Infinity Politics’, in Francis Morris (ed.), Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, 2012, p. 180).

“Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted even having to take time to sleep.”

After an explosive rise to fame in New York in the 1960s, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, withdrawing into a period of semi-obscurity whilst quietly amassing a prolific body of work. It was during this time that Kusama revisited her earlier pumpkin motif, combining her signature all-over Nets and obliterating polka-dot aesthetic with the theme of her favorite gourd. During the 1980s Kusama explored colorful variations of her pumpkin-pattern in two-dimensional paintings, drawings and prints; over the years her rendering of pumpkin ‘skin’ grew ever defter and more accomplished, with the flowing lines of dots advancing and receding rhythmically in a fastidiously precise yet dynamically organic manner. Even the seemingly blank or ‘undotted’ segments are overlaid with miniscule specks, contributing to a complex and intensely laborious configuration that pulsates and disorients with energy akin to that of Op art paintings.

YAYOI KUSAMA, MIRROR ROOM (PUMPKIN), 1991, (DETAILS) COLLECTION OF HARA MUSEUM CONTEMPORARY ART, JAPAN © YAYOI KUSAMA

Pumpkin (1990) was painted by Kusama and sold through Gallery Te, Tokyo, which was one of the very first galleries to sell Kusama’s artworks in the 1980s along with Fuji Television Gallery. Painted in 1990, it coincided with a very public resurgence for the artist: her first New York retrospective in 1989 at the Centre for International Contemporary Arts, which signified a major revival of American and European interest in Kusama’s work and becoming the first Japanese artist to grace the cover of Art in America that very same year. Paralleling this revival was a reevaluation of her work in Japan: just a year after Pumpkin (1990) was created, Kusama’s landmark exhibition Mirror Room (Pumpkin) was shown at the Fuji Television Gallery and the Hara Museum in Tokyo, which went on to be exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. Kusama was the first Japanese woman artist in the history of the Biennale to be granted a solo exhibition at the prestigious event.

The pumpkin stands as a symbol of triumph for the artist’s personal as well as artistic rebirth, representing a mediation of the artist’s psychiatric illness that went hand-in-hand with the ever-increasing sophistication, dexterity and creativity of her creations. As Alexandra Munroe writes, Kusama’s art requires her “not only to surrender to madness but also to triumph over it; trauma must be substantially transformed before it can communicate to others as beauty and meaning” (Alexandra Munroe, ‘Between Heaven and earth: The Literary Art of Yayoi Kusama’, in Exh. Cat. Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998, p. 81).