Three buttons

Three Buttons indicates a compositional close-up — a fragment of clothing, with the eye drawn to the small fastenings down a blouse or jacket. The title's specificity is characteristic of Saito Kaoru's late practice, in which he often isolated a single detail of female dress or accoutrement as the entire subject of a print. Mezzotint is well suited to this approach: the rocked plate yields a deep, even black against which the smooth sheen of fabric, the rounded edge of a button, and the cast shadow each side of it can be modeled through controlled burnishing. The viewer reads the print as a haptic object, attentive to surface and weight, in a manner closer to still-life sensibility than to figurative portraiture. Three Buttons sits at a remove from Saito's literary Genji series but draws on the same disciplined observation of garment and ornament that runs through that work, demonstrating his readiness to find a complete pictorial subject in a fragment rather than a full figure.