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Start Your JournalSelf-portrait, 1950
💫by Yayoi Kusama
Personal Reflection
This is the first painting I saw today in Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective in Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam. And then as I walked trough the room looking at her pater work I kept thinking of this one. Painted in 1950, this early self-portrait shows Yayoi Kusama not as a conventional human figure, but as something between a face, a flower and a cosmic form. A pair of lips remains visible beneath a large pink centre, while the rest of her identity seems to dissolve into the surrounding darkness. The work anticipates Kusama’s lifelong idea of “self-obliteration”: the disappearance of the individual into something larger and infinite. Even decades before her famous Infinity Rooms and polka dots, many of the ideas that would define her work were already here.
About This Artwork
This is Yayoi Kusama’s Self-Portrait (1950), an oil painting from very early in her career, long before the mirrored rooms, pumpkins and polka dots that would make her instantly recognizable. What makes the painting fascinating is that Kusama barely paints herself in the conventional sense. There is no recognizable face. Instead, a dark, almost cosmic field surrounds a large pink-red circular form edged with pointed, petal-like shapes. Only the small pair of lips near the bottom gives us an unmistakably human feature. The face seems to be dissolving into a flower, a sun, a cell, or perhaps an entire universe. That disappearance of the individual is important to Kusama. She later described the idea of “self-obliteration”: dissolving the boundaries between oneself and the surrounding world. The exhibition text connects this early painting directly to that idea, quoting her: “By obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the infinite universe.” The large pink circle at the centre can therefore be read not simply as part of her face, but as something larger than her. Seen retrospectively, the painting feels almost like a blueprint for the next seven decades of her work. The repetition, the central dot, the loss of a stable body and the suggestion of something continuing infinitely beyond the individual all become recurring ideas in Kusama’s practice.
- Artist
- Yayoi Kusama
- Location
- Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam
- Date experienced
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