At the Beach (C.156) returned to the coastal setting of Nude on Beach but with a more complex structure — multiple figures and objects arranged across a scene that combined the conventions of the beach scene with the spatial dislocations of the Surrealist Series. The colour bands of sand, water, and sky, rendered in the diagonal hatching of Lichtenstein's print vocabulary, provided the skeleton of a conventional beach scene; the Surrealist elements — the biomorphic figures, the unexpected spatial relationships — disrupted any reading of it as a straightforward depiction of a familiar subject.

Lichtenstein's Surrealist Series was examining what happened when Surrealism's strategies — displacement, juxtaposition, the uncanny — were applied to the most conventionalised settings of popular illustration. The beach scene was among the most thoroughly codified of American leisure imagery, its shorthand familiar from decades of magazine illustration, holiday advertising, and popular cinema. At the Beach (C.156) submitted this familiar setting to the Surrealist logic of disruption, the conventional elements rendered strange by their proximity to the biomorphic forms and spatial ambiguities the Surrealist tradition had developed.

What emerged was neither a conventional beach scene nor a straightforwardly Surrealist image — a collision that demonstrated Lichtenstein's characteristic method: identifying the conventions of one visual world, placing them in contact with another, and letting the friction between them do the work. At the Beach (C.156) staged this with the most familiar of subjects, and the friction proved as productive as anything in the more overtly art-historical series surrounding it in his catalogue.

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