Moskova river

Drawn from Ono's travels in the Soviet Union, this mokuhanga turns the Moscow River — the Moskva, here transliterated as Moskova — into a subject in the same tradition of urban waterway prints he had been producing in Tokyo since the 1930s. The image likely sets the river as a horizontal band across the composition, with the architecture of central Moscow on one or both banks: bridges, embankments, and the silhouettes of the city beyond. Rivers had been a recurring motif throughout Ono's career, from the industrial Sumida of his prewar period to the working waterfronts of postwar Tokyo, and the Moskva offered him a foreign equivalent — a river defined by the working life of a capital city rather than by scenic landscape. The print's interest lies partly in seeing his established graphic vocabulary, with its carved tonal planes and economical line, applied to a subject outside Japan. It also documents the cultural exchanges between sosaku-hanga artists and the Soviet Union during a period when Japanese creative prints were exhibited and collected in Eastern Europe.