Mirror #2 (C.107) presses the series' central question toward its limit, the circle on a cream ground reduced to the minimum information needed to read as a mirror — a yellow arc at the upper rim, a green segment in the lower left, scattered blue dots across the white interior, the whole surface so spare that it hovers at the edge of legibility. The mirror is barely present and yet present enough: the convention triggers even when almost nothing is there to trigger it.

Lichtenstein was examining how few marks were required before the representational code stopped functioning — how economically a reflective surface could be indicated while remaining recognisable as one. Mirror #2 (C.107) pushes that economy further than most works in the series, and what it discovers is that the answer is very few marks indeed, the dot field that stood in for glass in Mirror #1 thinned to near-disappearance, what remains a scattering of colour at the rim and a handful of dots that carry the whole weight of identification.

By 1972 this kind of inquiry sat in a specific art-historical context. Minimalism had spent a decade arguing that depicted reality was beside the point — that the physical presence of the object was the only honest basis for a work of art. Lichtenstein's mirrors engaged with that argument without conceding to it, staying within representation and testing how far it could be reduced before it ceased to operate. Mirror #2 (C.107) is the point in the series where that test comes closest to producing a negative result — and the fact that it doesn't, that the circle with its fragments of colour still reads as a mirror, is the work's quiet answer to the question Minimalism had been asking.

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