Nude on Beach (C.154) placed the figure in one of the most familiar settings in Western art — the nude in a landscape — and submitted it to the spatial dislocations of the Surrealist Series. The beach, rendered through colour bands and the diagonal hatching that characterised the series throughout, provided a setting whose conventional spatial organisation — sky above, ground below, figure between — was complicated by the Surrealist elements that disrupted any straightforward reading of the scene.

The beach nude had a specific tradition in Western art, from the bathers of Cézanne and Matisse to the beach scenes of Picasso's Surrealist period — the naked body in a natural setting, the erotic and the landscape traditions brought into productive proximity. Lichtenstein's version engaged with this tradition through his own terms,, the figure rendered in bold outline and diagonal striping rather than in the modelled, painterly style of his predecessors. Nude on Beach (C.154) was at once a Surrealist Series work, a beach scene, and a continuation of Lichtenstein's ongoing examination of the female nude as a subject — three art-historical traditions present simultaneously in a single picture.

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