The Student (C.176) introduced a specifically social subject into Roy Lichtenstein's Expressionist Woodcut Series — the young intellectual, the student figure that had been a recurring presence in Expressionist imagery as a representative of the generation whose sensitivity and seriousness set them apart from the complacent bourgeois world around them. The student in Expressionist art was often a self-portrait or a figure of identification — the young artist or thinker, earnest and isolated, placed in a tradition that claimed to express their inner life.

Lichtenstein's student was not any of these things. Rendered through the angular woodcut marks and physical embossing of the series, the figure was assembled from the same vocabulary as the other works — generic rather than individual, a type rather than a person, the subject's social identity indicated by convention rather than by observed particularity. The Expressionist tradition's claim to individual psychological truth was examined through a system that produced the same result regardless of the specific subject.

This was the Expressionist Woodcut Series' central critical operation. By applying the same marks to subjects that the Expressionist tradition had invested with specific emotional and social significance — the nude, the couple, the intellectual — Lichtenstein demonstrated that his woodcut vocabulary produced the impression of emotional content rather than recording it. The Student (C.176) made this point with a subject whose Expressionist associations were particularly clear, the figure's intellectuality and seriousness indicated by marks identical in type to those used for every other figure in the series.

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