Collection 1950s–1970s

Yayoi Kusama. No. F. 1959 449

Oil on canvas, 41 1/2 x 52" (105.4 x 132.1 cm). Sid R. Bass Fund. © 2025 Yayoi Kusama

Conservator, Corey D’Augustine: Let's take a look at a painting by Yayoi Kusama named Number F. It's one of her Infinity Net paintings from 1959. When we think about a net, it's a perfect grid when it's woven, but of course, once you start to use it, that grid deforms, becomes soft and round and looping. And that’s exactly what we're looking at here.

I want to start with this black and white background. Remember that she's previously worked with polka dots. Those polka dots are no longer dots, but spaces between this net, this woven lattice, the white stuff on the top. She's working in oil very thinly, using a generous amount of turpentine. So having painted this background, she then switches gears into painting with thick toothpaste quality artists, oil paint.

We think about this painting as an action painting, as a painting that recalls how it's being made. And, in fact, we can start to extrapolate what the practice of making this painting would feel like. These are really rotations of the knuckles and of the wrists. Kusama has a lot of patience, or perhaps anxiety, as she's working again and again and again and again, in this very serialized, very repetitive process.

Stepping back from the canvas, we see the effect of changing the viscosity of the paint from thick to thin, etc. Essentially, what this does is it creates multiple centers of gravity in the painting. There are dense areas. There are weaker looser areas. And as your eye wanders around this all over composition, there are some anchors where your eye really gets weighed down by this very heavy encrusted paint. So a quiet approach to the surface here, but still an extremely gestural one.