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Lot Essay
‘It is for the pumpkins that I keep on going’ (Yayoi Kusama)
Hypnotic and vibrant in its yellow and black palette, Pumpkin represents a dazzling convergence of Yayoi Kusama’s most enduring motifs. The work was painted in 1991: the same year she created the seminal Mirror Room (Pumpkin) and just two years before she represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale, becoming only the first female artist to do so. The pumpkin—Kusama’s most beloved subject—has guided her throughout her life as a grounding, comforting presence amid psychological turmoil. Here, it combines with the artist’s signature polka dots and web-like nets, both deeply linked to hallucinations she suffered as a child. Together, these motifs conspire to form a deeply personal portrait of Kusama’s inner world, alive with luminous vitality.
By the early 1990s, the pumpkin had become a defining motif within Kusama’s practice. It evolved from her early engagement with flowers and plants, which had informed her work since the early 1950s. As an art student in Kyoto, Kusama drew inspiration from childhood memories. ‘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,’ she recalls. Here and there along a path between fields of zinnias, periwinkles, and nasturtiums I caught glimpses of the yellow flowers and baby fruit of pumpkin vines. I stopped to lean in for a closer look, and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head … It immediately began speaking to me in the most animated manner’ (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011, p. 75). For Kusama, the pumpkin came to embody a sense humour and warmth, and would take centre stage in her practice following her return to Japan from New York. Proliferating across painting, sculpture and installation, it assumed an almost human-like presence in her oeuvre, each iteration imbued with decidedly individual character.
In the present work, the pumpkin’s oblong, ribbed form becomes a site of spiritual equilibrium. It floats atop a patterned background that evokes Kusama’s iconic Infinity Nets. These web-like structures came to define her practice after her arrival in New York in 1958, inextricably tied to her experiences of severe neurosis. They embodied her ‘perpetual labour to create artworks with no beginning and no end; in other words, a truly infinite task to recreate an abiding vision’ (L. Hoptman, Infinity Nets, in Yayoi Kusama, London 2012, p. 62). Within this dense, immersive mesh, the pumpkin emerges as a psychedelic vision, poised on the brink of dissolution. Its surface is covered in polka dots: a motif that originated in Kusama’s earliest hallucinations, and were recorded in her sketchbooks as a young teenager. While rooted in these visions, however, the dots became a powerful uplifting force within her practice, often placed against the ‘negative’ space of the nets in a bid to conjure a sense of infinite proliferation and self-obliteration (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net, ibid., p. 47).
Kusama’s devotion to pumpkins reflects her broader desire to connect with the natural world—an ambition she shared with Vincent van Gogh. United by mutual suffering, Kusama wrote that his art ‘overflows with humanity, tenacious beauty’, standing as a ‘triumph over the pain of feeling cornered and trapped’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 212). In Pumpkin, the webs and dots become Kusama’s guiding stars in her exploration of the infinite. As she has written, ‘My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe … How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? … One polka dot: a single particle among billions’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 23). Encapsulating the fundamental spirit of Kusama’s practice, Pumpkin stands as both a sanctuary and a shared emblem of endurance and hope.
Hypnotic and vibrant in its yellow and black palette, Pumpkin represents a dazzling convergence of Yayoi Kusama’s most enduring motifs. The work was painted in 1991: the same year she created the seminal Mirror Room (Pumpkin) and just two years before she represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale, becoming only the first female artist to do so. The pumpkin—Kusama’s most beloved subject—has guided her throughout her life as a grounding, comforting presence amid psychological turmoil. Here, it combines with the artist’s signature polka dots and web-like nets, both deeply linked to hallucinations she suffered as a child. Together, these motifs conspire to form a deeply personal portrait of Kusama’s inner world, alive with luminous vitality.
By the early 1990s, the pumpkin had become a defining motif within Kusama’s practice. It evolved from her early engagement with flowers and plants, which had informed her work since the early 1950s. As an art student in Kyoto, Kusama drew inspiration from childhood memories. ‘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,’ she recalls. Here and there along a path between fields of zinnias, periwinkles, and nasturtiums I caught glimpses of the yellow flowers and baby fruit of pumpkin vines. I stopped to lean in for a closer look, and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head … It immediately began speaking to me in the most animated manner’ (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011, p. 75). For Kusama, the pumpkin came to embody a sense humour and warmth, and would take centre stage in her practice following her return to Japan from New York. Proliferating across painting, sculpture and installation, it assumed an almost human-like presence in her oeuvre, each iteration imbued with decidedly individual character.
In the present work, the pumpkin’s oblong, ribbed form becomes a site of spiritual equilibrium. It floats atop a patterned background that evokes Kusama’s iconic Infinity Nets. These web-like structures came to define her practice after her arrival in New York in 1958, inextricably tied to her experiences of severe neurosis. They embodied her ‘perpetual labour to create artworks with no beginning and no end; in other words, a truly infinite task to recreate an abiding vision’ (L. Hoptman, Infinity Nets, in Yayoi Kusama, London 2012, p. 62). Within this dense, immersive mesh, the pumpkin emerges as a psychedelic vision, poised on the brink of dissolution. Its surface is covered in polka dots: a motif that originated in Kusama’s earliest hallucinations, and were recorded in her sketchbooks as a young teenager. While rooted in these visions, however, the dots became a powerful uplifting force within her practice, often placed against the ‘negative’ space of the nets in a bid to conjure a sense of infinite proliferation and self-obliteration (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net, ibid., p. 47).
Kusama’s devotion to pumpkins reflects her broader desire to connect with the natural world—an ambition she shared with Vincent van Gogh. United by mutual suffering, Kusama wrote that his art ‘overflows with humanity, tenacious beauty’, standing as a ‘triumph over the pain of feeling cornered and trapped’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 212). In Pumpkin, the webs and dots become Kusama’s guiding stars in her exploration of the infinite. As she has written, ‘My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe … How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? … One polka dot: a single particle among billions’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 23). Encapsulating the fundamental spirit of Kusama’s practice, Pumpkin stands as both a sanctuary and a shared emblem of endurance and hope.