Nude in the Woods (C.174) placed the figure in a landscape setting — the nude among trees, a subject with a long history in Western art that the Expressionist movement had made particularly charged. The German Expressionists had found in the forest a setting of primal significance — the trees as a symbol of natural vitality, the nude figure within them as an assertion of bodily presence against the alienating forces of modern urban life. Lichtenstein's version rendered the trees and the figure through the same angular woodcut marks, the distinction between the human body and the natural setting dissolved by the consistency of the treatment across the whole surface.

This dissolution — figure and landscape rendered through identical marks — was itself an art-historical argument. Expressionism had sought to merge the individual with the natural world, to assert a continuity between human vitality and the vitality of nature that industrial modernity threatened.

The embossing on Arches Cover paper gave Nude in the Woods (C.174) a physical texture that corresponded to the subject's immersion in the physical world of the forest — the paper's surface and the embossed marks introducing a tactile dimension that reinforced the subject without illustrating it. Lichtenstein consistently used the material properties of the print to carry his ideas, and Nude in the Woods (C.174) is one of the clearest examples of that approach in the Expressionist Woodcut Series.

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