Dr. Waldmann (C.173) introduced a specific subject into Roy Lichtenstein's Expressionist Woodcut Series — a named individual, the doctor figure drawn from Expressionist imagery, his presence giving the work a narrative quality the more generic figure studies in the series had avoided. The angular, physically assertive marks of the woodcut gave the figure a charged energy that recalled the Expressionist portrait tradition — the depiction of individuals rendered through marks of deliberate physical force, the artist's own bodily engagement with the material present in the printed image.

The Expressionist portrait had been among the most charged subjects of the movement — the depiction of specific individuals through a tradition that claimed to reveal psychological truth beneath social surface. Kirchner's portraits of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Kokoschka's visionary face studies, the intense draftsmanship of Dix's war veterans: these were works in which the representation of a specific person was inseparable from a claim about the nature of portraiture and psychological representation. Lichtenstein's Dr. Waldmann (C.173) engaged with this tradition, producing a figure who was at once a reference to the Expressionist portrait and a demonstration of what that tradition looked like when subjected to Pop Art's analytical attention.

The embossing that characterised the series added a physical dimension to the depiction of the figure — the doctor's form literally rising from the paper's surface, his presence asserted through material as well as drawn marks. Dr. Waldmann (C.173) was the work in the Expressionist Woodcut Series in which the physicality of the print medium was most productively aligned with the specific content of the image — the embossed marks reinforcing the Expressionist tradition's claim about the direct physical presence of the printed mark.

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