La Sortie (C.248) — the title meaning the exit or the way out — was the most compositionally spare work in Roy Lichtenstein's Interior Series, and the one that worked most directly with the lineage of fine art painting.

A single large armchair occupied the centre of the image, drawn in cool blue-grey tones against a wall defined by the diagonal hatching and dot patterns of Lichtenstein's print manner. The French title signalled an awareness — the interior as a painterly subject, from Bonnard and Vuillard through to the domestic interiors of mid-century modernism. Lichtenstein's close reading of the French tradition of interior painting was consistent with the range of the Interior Series as a whole. Where some works in the series drew primarily on the prevailing imagery of American consumer culture,

La Sortie (C.248) reached further back — to the Post-Impressionist and Intimist traditions in which the interior had been a vehicle for explorations of colour, light, and psychological atmosphere. The woodcut medium, used here without the screenprint combination that marked several other Interior works, gave La Sortie a slightly rougher, more physical surface quality — the grain of the block present in the printed marks, the impersonality of his working method complicated by the materiality of the process.

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