The entablature — the horizontal band of mouldings, friezes, and decorative elements that sits above the columns in classical architecture — was an unlikely subject for Pop Art. But Roy Lichtenstein's choice of it for a major print series in 1976 was entirely consistent with the art-historical dialogues that had driven his practice for a decade. Where the Cathedral and Haystack prints had engaged with Impressionism and the Bull series with abstraction, the Entablature works turned to the decorative conventions of classical and neoclassical architecture — one of the most codified systems in the Western tradition.

Entablature I (C.138) established the series' format: a horizontal composition presenting a fragment of architectural ornament — dentil moulding, rope twist, decorative frieze — rendered in Lichtenstein's bold, print language, the three-dimensional forms of classical architecture translated into the two-dimensional conventions of screenprint. A collaged metallic element running through the picture introduced a material richness that the print medium alone could not produce, giving the work a physical presence that reinforced its dialogue with architectural decoration.

The Entablature Series emerged from photographs Lichtenstein had taken of neoclassical buildings in New York — the banks, courthouses, and civic monuments that lined Midtown Manhattan. These buildings carried specific cultural associations: authority, permanence, the assertion of institutional power through the borrowed language of antiquity. By isolating the decorative band at the top of their façades and submitting it to close scrutiny, Lichtenstein examined the ornamental system through which that authority was constructed. Entablature I (C.138) opened this examination with characteristic directness — the ornament enlarged, flattened, and rendered strange by the same attention that had transformed comic books and Impressionism.

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