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拍品专文
Created soon after the artist’s arrival in New York City, Infinity Nets (1960) is a rare early example of Yayoi Kusama’s career-defining series of the same name. Endless small, looping strokes of white and crimson paint coalesce across the surface, revealing the black ground beneath as if through a scintillating mesh. The initial Infinity Nets, which Kusama made between 1958 and 1962, tend to be monochrome fields of either white or red: the present work uncommonly incorporates both colours. An amorphous crimson pool blooms upwards from the lower edge, framed by a radiant surround of blushing white. Both areas ripple with blended gradations from deep to light pink, which create a scalloped, overlapping sense of depth. The products of an obsessive, hallucinatory process and of fierce creative ambition, the Infinity Nets made Kusama’s name as an artist in the ferment of 1960s New York. They remain among her most iconic works to this day.
Kusama came to the United States in November 1957 at the age of twenty-eight, staying first in Seattle before settling in New York. It was there that she saw her future. She was determined to break free from her traumatic and restrictive home environment in rural Japan, and to succeed as an artist on her own terms. ‘If I wanted to develop and widen that path, staying in Japan was out of the question’, she later said. ‘My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice ... My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world’ (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2013, p. 93). Living in a Manhattan studio with broken windows, Kusama began work on the Infinity Nets in 1958. She would paint for forty or fifty hours at a stretch, covering vast canvases in countless, repetitive strokes. She battled cold and hunger, gazing wistfully at the beacon of the Empire State Building. She wanted, she said, ‘to grab everything that went on in the city and become a star’ (Y. Kusama quoted in F. Morris, ‘Introduction’, in Yayoi Kusama, exh. cat. Tate, London 2012, p. 12).
The Infinity Nets had their origin in hallucinations that Kusama had experienced since childhood, and she had made small-scale works with similar motifs as early as 1948. She described periods of ‘depersonalisation’—becoming detached from a sense of reality—in which she saw proliferating patterns that threatened to consume her, body and soul, along with the entire universe. A response to intense emotional disturbance, these episodes were often so distressing that Kusama had to be hospitalised. Painting the Infinity Nets was a transcendent, therapeutic process, allowing her both to lose and express herself through their endless repetitions. ‘This was my “epic”, summing up all that I was’, she said. ‘And the spell of the dots and the mesh enfolded me in a magical curtain of mysterious, invisible power’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 23).
Despite the profoundly personal compulsions that underlay her work, Kusama was keenly conscious of her place in the avant-garde art world. ‘Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot’, she said (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 24). Even before leaving Japan she had made contact with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who remained a supporter for many years. In New York she soon befriended figures including Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Frank Stella and Donald Judd. Judd greatly admired the large, white Infinity Nets he saw in her debut American solo show at Brata Gallery in 1959. ‘The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American’, he wrote. ‘Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent’ (D. Judd, October 1959, in Donald Judd Complete Writings 1959-1975, New York 2015, p. 2). These enveloping, monochromatic, ‘all-over’ paintings were equally conversant with the work of the New York School and with Judd’s emerging mode of East Coast Minimalism, while remaining entirely distinctive.
Kusama soon found success in America, receiving further solo exhibitions and participating in numerous group shows, including both the Carnegie International and Whitney Annual in 1961. In Europe, too, she was embraced by Minimalist counterpart movements such as Zero, Azimuth and Nul, whose concerns with monochromy, seriality and repetition were presaged by the Infinity Nets. Alongside Mark Rothko, Kusama was the sole New York representative in the major survey Monochrome Malerei at the Städtische Museum Leverkusen in 1960, and she showed again in Tentoonstelling Nul curated by Henk Peters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962. She also became friends with the pioneering ‘Spatialist’ Lucio Fontana, who helped to finance her infamous installation of mirrored spheres at the 1966 Venice Biennale.
The unique, hypnotic appeal of the Infinity Nets lies in their simultaneous complexity and simplicity. While their looping elements might at first seem mechanistic in their repetition, they soon reveal subtle variations in surface, colour and texture, with passages of radial impasto, shifting depths, zones of light and shade and, as in the present work, ambiguous, organic forms. Some are gigantic in scale, feats of creative endurance that almost become environments in themselves; others appear like glimpsed sections of an endlessly extensive whole. They shudder, shimmer and oscillate, each bearing a somatic tension between figure and ground. The contrasting palette in the present work foregrounds the biomorphic, bodily quality of the motif, which appears to have emanated from an interior world. Like a cellular membrane or a veil of stars, the surface conjures both the microcosmic and the cosmic.
Exhausted, Kusama ceased work on her first series of Infinity Nets in 1962. She would soon achieve her dreams of stardom, finding further acclaim for her sculptural accumulations, Infinity Room installations and radical performance works of the later 1960s—which featured similar proliferating forms, including polka-dots applied to nude performers—before eventually returning to Japan the following decade. In recent years Kusama has resumed the Infinity Net paintings, exploring new colours and techniques. Early works such as the present, however, remain perhaps the most raw and compelling products of her vision. They are at once intensely purposeful and expressions of ecstatic, terrifying transcendence. ‘My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it’, Kusama said. ‘… How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 23).
Kusama came to the United States in November 1957 at the age of twenty-eight, staying first in Seattle before settling in New York. It was there that she saw her future. She was determined to break free from her traumatic and restrictive home environment in rural Japan, and to succeed as an artist on her own terms. ‘If I wanted to develop and widen that path, staying in Japan was out of the question’, she later said. ‘My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice ... My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world’ (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2013, p. 93). Living in a Manhattan studio with broken windows, Kusama began work on the Infinity Nets in 1958. She would paint for forty or fifty hours at a stretch, covering vast canvases in countless, repetitive strokes. She battled cold and hunger, gazing wistfully at the beacon of the Empire State Building. She wanted, she said, ‘to grab everything that went on in the city and become a star’ (Y. Kusama quoted in F. Morris, ‘Introduction’, in Yayoi Kusama, exh. cat. Tate, London 2012, p. 12).
The Infinity Nets had their origin in hallucinations that Kusama had experienced since childhood, and she had made small-scale works with similar motifs as early as 1948. She described periods of ‘depersonalisation’—becoming detached from a sense of reality—in which she saw proliferating patterns that threatened to consume her, body and soul, along with the entire universe. A response to intense emotional disturbance, these episodes were often so distressing that Kusama had to be hospitalised. Painting the Infinity Nets was a transcendent, therapeutic process, allowing her both to lose and express herself through their endless repetitions. ‘This was my “epic”, summing up all that I was’, she said. ‘And the spell of the dots and the mesh enfolded me in a magical curtain of mysterious, invisible power’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 23).
Despite the profoundly personal compulsions that underlay her work, Kusama was keenly conscious of her place in the avant-garde art world. ‘Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot’, she said (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 24). Even before leaving Japan she had made contact with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who remained a supporter for many years. In New York she soon befriended figures including Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Frank Stella and Donald Judd. Judd greatly admired the large, white Infinity Nets he saw in her debut American solo show at Brata Gallery in 1959. ‘The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American’, he wrote. ‘Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent’ (D. Judd, October 1959, in Donald Judd Complete Writings 1959-1975, New York 2015, p. 2). These enveloping, monochromatic, ‘all-over’ paintings were equally conversant with the work of the New York School and with Judd’s emerging mode of East Coast Minimalism, while remaining entirely distinctive.
Kusama soon found success in America, receiving further solo exhibitions and participating in numerous group shows, including both the Carnegie International and Whitney Annual in 1961. In Europe, too, she was embraced by Minimalist counterpart movements such as Zero, Azimuth and Nul, whose concerns with monochromy, seriality and repetition were presaged by the Infinity Nets. Alongside Mark Rothko, Kusama was the sole New York representative in the major survey Monochrome Malerei at the Städtische Museum Leverkusen in 1960, and she showed again in Tentoonstelling Nul curated by Henk Peters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962. She also became friends with the pioneering ‘Spatialist’ Lucio Fontana, who helped to finance her infamous installation of mirrored spheres at the 1966 Venice Biennale.
The unique, hypnotic appeal of the Infinity Nets lies in their simultaneous complexity and simplicity. While their looping elements might at first seem mechanistic in their repetition, they soon reveal subtle variations in surface, colour and texture, with passages of radial impasto, shifting depths, zones of light and shade and, as in the present work, ambiguous, organic forms. Some are gigantic in scale, feats of creative endurance that almost become environments in themselves; others appear like glimpsed sections of an endlessly extensive whole. They shudder, shimmer and oscillate, each bearing a somatic tension between figure and ground. The contrasting palette in the present work foregrounds the biomorphic, bodily quality of the motif, which appears to have emanated from an interior world. Like a cellular membrane or a veil of stars, the surface conjures both the microcosmic and the cosmic.
Exhausted, Kusama ceased work on her first series of Infinity Nets in 1962. She would soon achieve her dreams of stardom, finding further acclaim for her sculptural accumulations, Infinity Room installations and radical performance works of the later 1960s—which featured similar proliferating forms, including polka-dots applied to nude performers—before eventually returning to Japan the following decade. In recent years Kusama has resumed the Infinity Net paintings, exploring new colours and techniques. Early works such as the present, however, remain perhaps the most raw and compelling products of her vision. They are at once intensely purposeful and expressions of ecstatic, terrifying transcendence. ‘My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it’, Kusama said. ‘… How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life’ (Y. Kusama, ibid., p. 23).