Entablature IX (C.146) returned to the material richness of the earlier prints after the restraint of Entablature VIII — the architectural ornament now rendered in a layered picture combining multiple printed elements with collaged materials, the horizontal format filled with the decorative complexity of neoclassical detail at its most elaborate. The work treated the frieze as a continuous decorative field rather than a set of isolated elements, the ornament running across the full width with an energy that recalled the carved stone friezes of classical buildings.

The frieze was the most narrative element of the classical entablature — the zone in which Greek and Roman architecture placed its carved accounts of battles, processions, and mythological events. Lichtenstein rendered it as pure decoration, the narrative content of the original friezes absent, the ornamental system examined in isolation from any literary or historical meaning. Stripping narrative from a form historically designed to carry it was characteristic of his approach across all his source material — attention directed at how the system worked, not at what it was saying.

Entablature IX (C.146) demonstrated the full technical range of the series in a single work — screenprint, lithograph, collage, and embossing combined to produce a surface of considerable complexity. By this stage the technical ambition of these prints had become part of their meaning: the elaborateness of the making process corresponding to the elaborateness of the decorative tradition being examined.

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