Yayoi Kusama — Explosion anatomique + Manifestation non identifiée — Pair of Museum Postcards, Éditions Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019

Pair of museum postcards
Approx. 15 × 10.5 cm each
Offset print on card stock; black-and-white photographic reproductions to recto, archival and publication details to verso
Published by Éditions Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019
Photographs by Harry Shunk and János Kender
Condition: very good; light handling wear and minor surface marks consistent with storage

Includes:

1. Explosion anatomique, Pont de Brooklyn, New York, 1968
Black-and-white photograph showing Yayoi Kusama alongside nude performers covered in polka dots beneath a large KUSAMA SELF-OBLITERATION banner on the Brooklyn Bridge.

2. Manifestation non identifiée, New York, 1968
Black-and-white photograph depicting two embracing nude performers covered in polka dots beneath an American flag within one of Kusama’s accumulation environments.

This pair reproduces documentary photographs from Kusama’s pivotal New York period of the late 1960s, when her practice moved beyond painting and into public actions, staged demonstrations, and politically charged Happenings. Both images were captured by the important photographic partnership of Harry Shunk and János Kender, whose archive remains one of the primary visual records of postwar avant-garde activity.

Produced at the height of the Vietnam War and wider countercultural unrest, Kusama’s public actions used nudity, repetition, and spectacle as forms of protest. Her recurring polka dots functioned as more than decoration; they formed part of her idea of Self-Obliteration, a strategy intended to dissolve the boundaries of individual identity through repetition and shared surface. Bodies, objects, and environments become absorbed into a continuous field.

The Brooklyn Bridge action transforms a recognisable structure into a temporary stage. The Manifestation non identifiée image moves toward something more psychologically charged — intimacy, nationalism, eroticism, and confrontation compressed into a single frame.

As objects, the postcards operate as secondary documents of ephemeral actions that originally resisted permanence. Performance disappears; the image remains. The image enters an archive; the archive returns as a printed support.

Original period items. Shipping and handling included in the listed price.