Red Apple and Yellow Apple (C.197) returned to the double-fruit arrangement of Apple and Lemon in a different chromatic key — two apples where the earlier work had paired apple and lemon, the warm red and yellow palette producing a picture of considerable chromatic energy. The two forms, rendered in overlapping layers of woodcut mark, occupied the horizontal format with a density that gave the work a presence larger than its physical dimensions.

Lichtenstein's interest in serial variation — the examination of the same compositional structure in different chromatic relationships — ran across the Seven Apple Woodcut series as it had across the Haystack, Cathedral, and Mirror series. Red Apple and Yellow Apple (C.197) was the series' most direct demonstration of this: the same two-fruit arrangement, the same horizontal format, in a different colour combination, the argument about colour's independence from subject conducted through the simplest possible means.

The woodcut marks here were among the most gestural and energetic in the series — the red marks particularly forceful, their directional energy giving the picture a physical urgency that the cooler works in the group had consciously avoided. By 1982 Lichtenstein was using the woodcut with complete technical confidence, exploiting the medium's capacity for physical mark-making in ways that extended the range of his print work well beyond the precise, controlled surfaces that had defined his earlier output. Red Apple and Yellow Apple (C.197) demonstrated that range with particular clarity.

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