Yayoi Kusama's Flowers (4) (1999) places a vase of wildflowers against a saturated red ground — stems curling outward in loose spiraling arcs, blooms opening at their tips, the whole arrangement rendered in deep blue against a red field that covers every surface with a yellow irregular network of lines. The vase at the base is rendered in blue with its own pattern of lines and dots, the stems rising from it in curving blue lines covered in small red marks, the flowers at their tips simple and open — five or six petals around a centre, drawn with the same economy as botanical illustrations. The stems extend far beyond what any conventional vase arrangement would contain, curling outward to the left and right and upward, filling the full height of the image with a looseness that gives the image its energy.

The blue of the stems and flowers sits against the red ground in a contrast that has the quality of a woodblock print — the two colours pressing against each other with equal weight, neither receding. Van Gogh understood this quality of the flower arrangement pushed to its limits — his Arles vase paintings filling the canvas with sunflowers until the image became almost abstract, the stems and heads crowding every corner, the yellow burning against complementary blues with the same insistence that Kusama's red and blue carry here. Both artists used the flower arrangement as a vehicle for investigating colour relationships and structural pressure rather than for botanical description, the subject chosen for its familiarity and then transformed by the intensity of the treatment. The red ground is filled with a yellow network of irregular lines — the same system as the background of many works in this period but here in a warm palette that makes the red feel even more saturated, the yellow lines almost disappearing into it at a distance, visible only on closer inspection.

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