Stairs

Stairs treats an architectural fragment as the entire subject of the composition, a strategy Ono used throughout his career to extract graphic interest from ordinary urban infrastructure. The title suggests a study of risers and treads cutting across the picture plane, the kind of geometric subject that lent itself to the high-contrast black-and-white woodblock printing he favored from his Ichimoku-kai years onward. As a self-carved and self-printed sosaku-hanga work, the print would have been pulled by hand with a baren on washi, the grain of the block typically left visible in the inked passages. Ono's training under the influence of Koshiro Onchi disposed him toward compositions that flattened three-dimensional subjects into planar arrangements of light and shadow. Stairs of this kind link directly to the urban, working-class subject matter of his 1930s output — staircases of factories, tenements, and back alleys read as evidence of the industrial Tokyo he had documented since youth, without figures but carrying the same social consciousness.