Apple with Grey Background (C.194) is the most tonally restrained work in Roy Lichtenstein's Seven Apple Woodcut Series — the fruit rendered in blue and red against a field of grey, the neutral ground giving the picture a quality of studied deliberateness absent from the more chromatically energetic works in the group. The grey recalled the tonal studies of Cézanne, whose grey-ground still life drawings had been among the most rigorous works of the Post-Impressionist period.

The woodcut medium, with its physical grain and the evidence of the tool's passage through the wood block, gave Apple with Grey Background (C.194) a material presence that the grey palette reinforced. The marks were looser and more gestural than anything in Lichtenstein's screenprint work — the form of the apple built from accumulated directional strokes rather than from a single defining outline, the colour fields layered and physical rather than applied with the precision of a stencil. This was the woodcut used for its own inherent qualities, the process itself part of what the picture showed.

The woodcut had been the medium of German Expressionism — Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff — and its physical energy and gestural directness carried those associations even when applied, as Lichtenstein was applying it, to a subject as quiet and domestic as a fruit study. Apple with Grey Background (C.194) was the work in the series where this tension between the medium's history and its subject was most clearly held — the grey ground keeping the chromatic energy at bay, the woodcut marks doing their physical work within an unusually contained space.

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