Blonde (C.230) returned to the female figure that had been central to Roy Lichtenstein's practice since the early 1960s — the comic-book woman, blonde, wide-eyed, emotionally expressive — and rendered her through the Brushstroke Figures Series' vocabulary of gestural marks. The flowing yellow brushstrokes of the hair were the dominant formal element, their curving forms filling the upper half of the composition with the energy and movement that had characterised Lichtenstein's Brushstroke works since the mid-1960s.

The blonde figure was among the most discussed and debated images in Lichtenstein's catalogue. The women of his early comic-book works — their wide eyes, their emotional expressiveness, their dependence on the visual conventions of romance and domestic narrative — had been central to critical responses to his practice, their representation raising questions about the male gaze, the objectification of the female figure, and the relationship between popular culture's visual conventions and the fine art context that claimed to examine them. The Brushstroke Figures Series returned to this figure with the accumulated self-awareness of a practice that had been engaged with these questions for three decades.

By rendering the blonde figure through brushstroke marks rather than through the flat graphic language of his early works, Roy Lichtenstein transformed the image without resolving the questions it raised. The gestural marks gave the figure a physical energy that the flat outlines of the comic-book style had withheld, but they remained as graphic and as conventional as any of the marks in his earlier work. Blonde (C.230) was a return to origins that produced something new — a figure simultaneously familiar and formally transformed by the medium through which it was now expressed.
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