Early spring in Moscow

This print belongs to the body of work Ono produced from his travels to the Soviet Union, a destination consistent with the leftist sympathies that had shaped his prewar prints of Japanese workers and factories. Early spring in Moscow likely depicts the city in its transitional season — bare trees, residual snow, perhaps the silhouettes of the capital's domed or neoclassical architecture against an overcast sky. Sosaku-hanga artists who travelled abroad in the 1950s and 60s typically translated foreign subjects into the same self-carved, self-printed mokuhanga vocabulary they used at home, and Ono's Moscow images retain the graphic clarity and tonal restraint of his Japanese landscapes. The choice of season is telling: rather than the picturesque snow-covered Moscow of foreign romance, early spring is the working city emerging from winter, a subject in keeping with Ono's long-standing interest in everyday urban life. The print is also a record of the international exchanges that connected Japanese creative printmakers with sympathetic audiences and institutions in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War.