Woman with black hair

The 1955 Woman with Black Hair, edition 3 of 100, shows Azechi working with the figure of a woman defined by the visual mass of her dark hair—a subject that shifted his compositional emphasis from the mountain environment's broad horizontal and vertical elements to the intimate close-up of a personal feature. The black hair in the print's light ground would function as the bold dark element that in his mountain compositions was typically provided by rock face or dense shadow, here transferred to the figure's most distinctive attribute.