Yayoi Kusama's Pumpkin (YT) (1996) takes the yellow-on-black configuration and presents it in a more elongated, upright form than the broader variants of the series — the pumpkin tall and narrow, its ribs rising in long parallel columns from a wide base to a pronounced stem, the whole form occupying the full vertical extent of the image. The black dots run from small marks along the outer rounded sections to large circles down the two central columns, the sequence giving the pumpkin a strong vertical rhythm that draws the eye upward from base to stem. The yellow is a warm, slightly golden tone — closer to amber than to the bright yellow of the 2004 portfolio works — giving the image a richer, more restrained quality than the later variants.

The broken pattern in the black ground is rendered in the same golden yellow as the pumpkin, the irregular lines radiating outward from behind the form and extending to all four edges. The background here is more open and spacious than in the densely packed later works, the lines sitting further apart, leaving more black visible between them — the ground breathing rather than pressing in. Kusama produced the pumpkin across a remarkable range of colour combinations throughout the 1990s, each variant testing what a shift in tone alone could do to a form that otherwise remained constant.

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