The warm, loose marks of Portrait (C.229) assembled a face from materials that had nothing to do with likeness — brushstroke forms in peach, teal, yellow, and dark red stacked into something that read as a head and shoulders, the eyes suggested by horizontal strokes, the hair by cascading yellow marks at the right. The title placed this squarely within the oldest continuous genre in Western painting, and the gap between what the word promised and what the image delivered was the work's whole subject.

Portrait painting had been the primary vehicle through which Western art asserted its relationship to individual identity — the face as proof of presence, the likeness as a form of permanence. Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Holbein had made it the most demanding of all genres precisely because the standard was always external and specific: you either captured the person or you didn't. Lichtenstein's portrait captured no one. The marks that constituted the face were the same marks used for every other figure in the series — no more specific to this face than to any other, the brushstroke vocabulary producing a generic human form that wore the genre's title without fulfilling its obligation. That was the point, and Portrait (C.229) made it with a directness that the more abstract works in the series, where the figure was barely present, could not quite achieve.

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