Apple and Lemon (C.193) opens Roy Lichtenstein's Seven Apple Woodcut Series, produced in 1982 on handmade Iwano Kizuki Hosho paper — his most sustained return to the woodcut medium since the Expressionist Woodcut Series of the previous year. The picture presents two fruit forms rendered in the energetic, gestural line of the woodcut: the apple indicated by its characteristic circular form in blue outline, the lemon a contrasting yellow shape, both emerging from an accumulated field of overlapping marks in green, black, and brown rather than from the clean outlines and unmodulated colour of his screenprint work.

The character of the series was immediately apparent — loose, multi-directional marks built up in layers, the woodcut's physical grain present in the printed surface, the forms arriving through accumulation rather than through outline and fill. This was a deliberately different mode, rougher and more physically immediate, and its choice for a series engaging with the still life tradition carried a clear art-historical position.

The apple had been among the most loaded subjects in the history of still life painting — from Cézanne's obsessive examination of fruit in the 1880s and 1890s, the studies that laid the groundwork for Cubism, to the symbolic apples of Magritte's Surrealism. Lichtenstein's apple drew from none of these directly; it was the apple as a sign, its form simplified to its most essential outline while the marks surrounding it carried the physical energy of the woodcut process. Apple and Lemon (C.193) established this as the series' starting point — the fruit examined not as a painterly subject but as a question about how a subject becomes one.

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