Image No. 2. Weisse Blume

"Image No. 2: Weisse Blume" (White Flower) employs a German title — characteristic of Onchi's generation's engagement with European modernism — for a print that reduces the flower to its essential formal elements: the white petals as pure light against the surrounding color, the stem and leaves as structural lines, the organic form as a vehicle for the kind of abstract composition that European Expressionism and Jugendstil had demonstrated was possible in decorative arts. The "Image" series marked Onchi's formal investigation of how natural subjects could be treated with increasing abstraction.