Christmas came early this year for the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), which just discovered four previously unknown works by famed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in a manila envelope stored in its archives. Though the artist is renowned for her polka-dotted sculptures and installations that draw massive Instagram-seeking crowds, these four works are small paintings in watercolor, ink, pastel, and tempera that date back to 1953 and 1954.

Yayoi Kusama, Fire, 1954. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Yayoi Kusama, Autumn, 1953. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Archivist Anna Rimel made the find in the museum’s Joseph Cornell Study Center, where she was perusing Cornell's studio effects—the Kusama works were gifted to the Smithsonian in 1978, four years after his death. While the discovery was quite a surprise, it’s not altogether shocking that the pieces were found in the holdings. Cornell and Kusama developed a close personal relationship in 1962, just a few years after the latter moved to New York from Japan. Cornell, who was 26 years older than Kusama, often helped the younger artist before she found success; he purchased these four works from the artist for just $200 in 1964, according to a receipt found with the paintings. Today, Kusama is one of the world’s most expensive living female artists, with an auction record of $8 million for her painting Interminable Net #4, which sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April.

Yayoi Kusama, Deep Grief, 1954. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Yayoi Kusama, Forlorn Spot, 1953. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This is not the first time a museum has been surprised by its own holdings. In 2014, for instance, a previously undiscovered Celtic brooch that was stolen by Vikings more than a millennium ago was unearthed in the holdings of the British Museum. In that case, the item “had been concealed in a lump of organic material excavated from a Viking burial site at Lilleberge in Norway by a British archaeologist in the 1880s and acquired by the British Museum in 1891,” reported The Guardian.

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The four new Kusama works have been officially transferred to the collection of SAAM, but the museum currently has no plans to display them to the public. The artist’s next exhibition will open at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx in May 2020, though you can see permanent installations of her work at Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and the Broad in Los Angeles, among other museums.