Factory H

The title designates a specific industrial site by initial—Factory H—a naming convention that locates the print within a sequence or series treating identified factories. Ono renders the building in the high-contrast graphic mode that defined his prewar industrial subjects: the volumes of the structure are reduced to flat tonal masses, with chimneys, walls, and roofs articulated by carved line rather than modeled in continuous tone. The composition foregrounds the architectural geometry of industrial production—repeated openings, vertical stacks, horizontal sheds—against a sky that is left as flat printed ground or worked with light [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi). Factory subjects of this kind formed the core of Ono's contribution to the leftist current in [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) during the 1930s, when he and other printmakers in that orbit took up the worker, the machine, and the industrial site as direct subjects of creative printmaking. Ono carved and printed the work himself in the sosaku-hanga method, the artist's hand visible throughout the surface of the [washi](/glossary/washi).