Pumpkin BY (2004) by Yayoi Kusama sets the pumpkin in yellow against a deep blue ground — the only work in the 2004 Pumpkins portfolio to use blue, giving it a distinctly cooler and more nocturnal quality than the black and red variants that surround it. The blue ground changes everything. Where black recedes and red advances, blue holds a middle position — present and saturated but not competing with the yellow in the same way the warmer grounds do.

The white lines of the angular field are visible against it, adding a faint luminosity to the background that gives the image an almost celestial quality, the pumpkin sitting against something that reads less like a flat ground and more like a night sky seen through a cracked window. The dots scale from small along the outer ribs to large circles at the broadest sections, the blue marks on yellow describing the volume of the pumpkin with the same systematic precision as the other works in the series. The stem at the top is rendered in deep blue-black, the only element that shares the temperature of the background, anchoring the form to the ground it sits against.

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