Yayoi Kusama's Thinking Pumpkin (1993) is one of the most unusual works in the Pumpkins series — rendered in black and white lithography rather than screenprint, the absence of colour giving the image a graphic intensity that the colour works approach from a different direction entirely. The pumpkin here is elongated and large, its ribs hanging downward in long curved columns that extend almost the full height of the sheet. The dot sequence runs from tiny marks along the narrow outer rounded sections to large bold circles down the central columns, the scale shift more dramatic than in most works in the series, the largest dots substantial enough to read as independent forms rather than as texture.

The white of the pumpkin sits against a deep black ground covered in the angular network rendered in white lines — so the background, the pumpkin, and repeated dots all share the same two tones, differentiated entirely by structure rather than colour. The title introduces something the visual does not — a psychological state, the pumpkin attributed an interior life. Kusama has spoken of her relationship with the pumpkin in terms that go beyond formal interest, describing conversations with the vegetable in childhood, a sense that it possessed its own presence and responded to attention.

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