The Pacific Ocean, 1958

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
The Pacific Ocean, 1958
Oil on canvas
122.9 x 175.9 cm (48 3/8 x 69 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 1958 (on the reverse)

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist circa 1960 by the present owner

Auction History
Property from the Collection of Alice Denney
Sotheby’s New-York: 13 May 2024
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 4,658,000

The Pacific Ocean | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

A labyrinthine network of pebble-like black forms swarm the surface of Yayoi Kusama’s The Pacific Ocean from 1958, which ranks among the earliest, most significant examples of her Pacific Ocean works. Executed the year Kusama emigrated from Japan to New York, the present work unifies the dot and loop motifs which have since consumed her practice for more than six decades, presaging the signature vernacular of her Infinity Nets. Inspired by the aerial view of the rippling sea from her plane window, The Pacific Ocean embodies Kusama’s nascent ingenuity at a moment of extraordinary vulnerability: the genesis of a life-long exploration of the minute and expansive, the personal and universal. Further testifying to the significance of the present work, The Pacific Ocean was acquired directly from the artist by Alice Denney, a collector and advocate of her work during Kusama’s initial years in the United States, and other early paintings are held in such esteemed institutional collections as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Through her miniscule, amorphous bulbs, mere specks in a swirling sea, Kusama is able to tap into the beginnings of life itself – from the molecular and microscopic to the immeasurably vast. Applied with punctilious care, dots swell across the present work’s silvery gray field in resplendent, mesmeric droves, evoking not only the undulations of the sea but the molecular and the photonic. Veils of misty white envelop over the lace-like web, echoing the damp imprints of the sea lapping over the shore. The delicate skeins of paint begin to dilate and pulsate, assuming a transcendent sense of movement: reflecting both the cresting sea and the artist’s displacement from her home country. Kusama’s devotion to dots, seen in the present work in its burgeoning state but extending through to her most recent works, is a coping mechanism for the artist, in response to her vivid hallucinations of oscillating, kaleidoscopic patterns. Here, Kusama’s process represents the inverse of her technique with the Infinity Nets, in which her loops are laid over a colored ground. The Pacific Ocean finds its origin in a suite of watercolors of the same title, which Kusama revealed were inspired by the volumes of “shallow space” contained within the wavelets seen from her plane seat. (the artist quoted in: Midori Yamamura, “Kusama Yayoi’s Early Years in New York: A Critical Biography,” Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York, New Haven, 2007, p. 57)

The conceptual underpinnings of The Pacific Ocean – of immigration, neurosis, childhood trauma – paints a delicate, sober portrait of Kusama’s mind. “I was always standing at the centre of the obsession,” Kusama recalled, “over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me.” (The artist quoted in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 103) Her earliest advocates upon her arrival embraced her vision wholeheartedly, from her paintings to her performance art.

Left: Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950. Image © Art Institute of Chicago / Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; restricted gifts of Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. Noah Goldowsky / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Agnes Martin, Grey Stone II, 1961. Sold at Sotheby’s, New York for $18.7 million in November 2023. Private Collection. Art © 2024 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

One such supporter was Alice Denney, who even participated in the Happening Kusama staged as part of her show Aggregation: One Thousand Boats from December 1963 – January 1964 at Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York. One of the first founding members of the Jefferson Place Gallery, a collective founded in 1957 for local artists in Washington, D.C., Denney was acutely attuned to the postwar avant-garde alongside D.C.-based gallerist Beatrice Perry, who mounted Kusama’s first show of Infinity Nets at Gres Gallery in 1960. Denney’s curatorial influence was far-reaching and her approach experimental, organizing Popular Image in 1963 at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the museum she co-founded in Washington, D. C. in 1962. Popular Image was one of the earliest exhibitions of Pop Art in the United States, and Denney also organized a Pop Art festival concurrent to the show, including Claes Oldenburg’s Stars Happening. She recommended Alan Solomon to curate the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964, and together with legendary dealer Leo Castelli set their intentions on securing the Grand Prize for Robert Rauschenberg. That The Pacific Ocean has resided in her preeminent collection for over sixty years further testifies to its seminal importance in Kusama’s oeuvre, and the radicality of its creation.

Within the rarified group of Kusama’s early paintings featuring the net motif, The Pacific Ocean is distinguished as one of the most personalized, explicit revelations of the iconic series’ origin. As atomic specks of paint suffuse the viewer, The Pacific Ocean reveals Kusama as the visionary she has continuously proven herself to be, inviting us into her mind and ushering us toward infinity.

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