Painting on Blue and Yellow Wall (C.208) closes Roy Lichtenstein's Paintings Series with the most environmentally contextualised picture in the group — the depicted painting shown against a two-tone wall of blue and yellow, the architectural setting as present and as carefully rendered as the painting it displayed. The wall's bold colour division recalled the colour fields of modernist interior design, giving the picture a clarity that made the depicted painting — and its relationship to the space around it — the explicit subject.

The relationship between a painting and the wall on which it hung had been a subject of considerable interest in twentieth-century art and design. The modernist interior, with its carefully considered colour schemes and its deliberate relationships between wall colour and hung artwork, had raised the question of whether the context of display was part of the work itself — a question that Institutional Critique examined with increasing rigour from the 1970s onward. Lichtenstein's Paintings Series participated in this conversation from a Pop Art position: the wall and the painting were both pictorial elements, both subject to the conventions of representation, both available for the same kind of scrutiny.

Painting on Blue and Yellow Wall (C.208) made this most explicit by giving the wall equal presence to the painting it displayed. The blue and yellow division was not a neutral backdrop but a composition in its own right, its relationship to the depicted painting as carefully considered as any element of Lichtenstein's own pictures. The series closed, appropriately, by asking whether the wall was part of the artwork — and finding that, in this context, it unmistakably was.

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