Nude (C.233) brought the Brushstroke Figures Series to its most ambitious subject — the full standing figure, the warm orange and red strokes building a body from head to base against a dense diagonal hatching ground that pressed the figure forward and gave the whole surface an intensity the head-and-shoulders works hadn't reached. The hatched background was the picture's most distinctive quality: where other works in the series had used open grounds that let the figure breathe, this one surrounded it with pattern, the strokes of the body competing with the strokes of the setting for attention.

The nude carried more accumulated weight than any other subject in Western painting — from Titian and Rubens through Ingres, Manet, and Matisse, the unclothed female figure had been the genre through which painters tested their command of form, colour, and the relationship between depicted body and depicted space. Manet's Olympia had in 1865 made the nude a site of critical confrontation rather than aesthetic pleasure, and every nude produced after it carried that confrontation as a condition of the subject. Lichtenstein's version added another layer: a body built from the gestural strokes that Abstract Expressionism had used to escape the figure entirely, the nude arriving through the very marks that had once been used to leave it behind.

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