Kusama New Year’s Cards

Yayoi Kusama, New Year’s Card, 1963, ink and photo collage on paper, 3 1/2 x 6 1/4 in., selling from the estate of Idelle Weber at Rago This is fascinating. Not Yayoi Kusama sending New Year’s Cards, which is an extremely Japanese thing to do. But Kusama making cards by collaging torn photos of her Infinity Net paintings. Yayoi Kusama, New Year’s Card for Georgia O’Keeffe, 1963, photo collage and ink on card, folded in half along the top, I think, in the O’Keeffe collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library As the auctioneers at Rago note—by linking to @garadinervi’s tumblr instead of directly to her stuffed correspondence folder at the Beinecke—Kusama also sent a similar 1963 New Year’s card to Georgia O’Keeffe. With three different fragments at three different scales, Kusama was stretching the photos of her Infinity Nets as a medium in its own right. There’s another, probably earlier, 1950s New Year’s Card in the Beinecke’s O’Keeffe/Kusama correspondence folder, but there are also photos…