Two nearly identical panels side by side — Imperfect Diptych 57⅞ x 93¾ inches (C.225) closed the Imperfect Series with a visual joke that only the diptych format could make. The left panel and the right panel share the same arrangement of intersecting triangles in cream, red-striped, dot-field, and grey, the same diagonal lines driving across the surface — and then differ in the small but pointed ways that the series had always located its argument: a green vertical line in the left panel becomes blue in the right, a small green triangle appears on the right that wasn't in the left, the dot density shifts. The two panels look like the same work until they don't.

It was a wry way to end a series built around the failure of geometric ideals — not a dramatic breakdown but a quiet substitution, the kind of near-identical variation that quality control should have caught but didn't. Newman and Kelly had used the divided canvas to assert the painting's completeness, the gap between panels a formal decision that unified rather than divided. Lichtenstein's gap separated two versions of the same image that were almost but not quite the same thing, the imperfection located in the relationship between the panels as much as within either one.

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