Pumpkin

Medium: Screenprint on Verin d’Arches paper
[2 screens, 2 colors, 2 runs]
Year: 1982
Image: 68.6 x 55 cm (27 x 21.7 inches)
Sheet: 86×63 cm (33.9 x 24.8 inches)
Edition: 50
Artist’s Proofs: 5 AP
Printer’s Proofs: 3 PP
Printer: Students of the Art School (BIGAKKOU) supervised by Okabe Tokuzo, Tokyo
Literature: ABE 16
ABE Publishing Ltd., Yayoi Kusama: Prints 1979-2017, Tokyo, 2017, Number 16, Illustrated page 20

Signed, dated, and numbered in pencil on lower edge

 

Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin captures her iconic pumpkin motif in a striking yellow, set against a black background patterned with interlocking yellow triangles. The pumpkin, floating at the center, is adorned with Kusama’s signature black polka dots, whose varying sizes create a mesmerizing, almost illusionistic sense of depth. These dots accentuate the pumpkin’s rounded, undulating segments, drawing the viewer’s gaze across its sculptural form. The pumpkin’s curves culminate in a stem tilted to the right, further enhancing its dynamic presence. This work is a quintessential example of the infinite repetition and accumulation that best defines Kusama’s practice, through which she transforms the humble pumpkin into a vivid allegory of her unique artistic and personal world. 

“It seems pumpkins do not inspire much respect, but I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness.”

Kusama’s affinity with the misshapen gourd is rooted deeply in the artist’s biography. Growing up on her family’s seed farm in Matsumoto, Kusama was surrounded by the natural world, an environment that directly informed the severe auditory and visual hallucinations that the artist first began to experience as a child. However, where her recollections of other animated plants and accumulating talking flowers take on more terrifying dimensions that the artist would compulsively return to in her phallic soft sculpture installations, Infinity Nets, and mirrored environments, the pumpkin provided an altogether more comforting vision.

“The first time I ever saw a pumpkin was when I was in elementary school and went with my grandfather to visit a big seed-harvesting ground […] and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head […] it immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner […] It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form.”

Since then, the artist has gone to lengths to describe the joy and comfort that the humble and humorously shaped squash has provided over the years, and her work continues to celebrate them and the unassuming joie de vivre that they embody. Among the earliest subjects treated by the burgeoning artist, Kusama’s first depictions of pumpkins date from the 1940s, following her training at the Kyoto City Senior High School of Art in the traditional Nihonga style of painting. Kusama would later describe the meditative effect of this practice, repeatedly returning to the kabocha and capturing their unique charm in a manner that anticipates the compulsive repetitiousness of her later Infinity Nets and mirrored environments. Tellingly, the pumpkins made their presence felt in these performances too, forming an integral part of the presentation Mirror Room (Pumpkin) in the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 iteration of La Biennale di Venezia, where the artist, costumed in polka dots, dispensed smaller handheld pumpkins to visitors. The room – like the pumpkins and the artist herself – was covered in black polka dots, recalling her Happenings in 1960s New York and their emphasis on modes of “self-obliteration”.

 

 

 

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Auction Results

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K Auction Seoul: 26 November 2020
Estimated: KRW 90,000,000 – 130,000,000
KRW 90,850,000 / USD 82,105

YAYOI KUSAMA
Pumpkin, 1982
Screenprint
Signed in English, titled in Japanese, dated 1982 and numbered 38/50

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 1 April 2018
Estimated: HKD 150,000 – 200,000
HKD 600,000 / USD 76,445

YAYOI KUSAMA
PUMPKIN, 1982
Screenprint
Signed in English, titled in Japanese, dated 1982 and numbered 38/50