Sleeping Muse (C.203) introduced a specific art-historical reference into Roy Lichtenstein's Paintings Series — the Brancusi sculpture of the same name, the ovoid head rendered here as a painting depicted within a print, the canonical modernist object absorbed into his examination of the painting as a domestic thing. The Brancusi reference was not incidental: the Sleeping Muse was among the most celebrated objects in twentieth-century modernism, its polished bronze surface and reductive form representative of the Modernist belief in pure form as a universal language.

By depicting a painting of the Brancusi within a larger picture that placed it in an interior context — alongside wall surfaces, frames, and the decorative elements of a domestic or gallery space — Lichtenstein submitted the canonical modernist object to the same treatment he had given to Monet's haystacks and Picasso's Cubist forms: absorption into the world of the everyday, the fine art object rendered as one element among many in a decorated interior. The Sleeping Muse, placed within a painting placed within a print, underwent a process of cultural domestication that the Paintings Series was making its central subject.

The combination of woodcut, lithograph, and screenprint on Arches 88 paper gave the picture a surface of considerable richness, the different processes producing different qualities of mark suited to the different demands — the smooth depicted sculpture, the painted surface around it, the wall and frame of the depicted painting. Lichtenstein's technical command of the multi-process print was at its fullest development in the Paintings Series, and Sleeping Muse (C.203) demonstrated that command with unusual clarity.

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