Brushstrokes (C.45), made in 1967 and designed for the Pasadena Art Museum's Lichtenstein exhibition of that year, was one of the most self-aware works of his career. The print showed five interlacing gestural strokes — the strokes of a loaded brush applied with the energy and imprecision of Abstract Expressionist painting — built through the mechanical regularity of Lichtenstein's screenprint style. The brushstroke, in the lineage of American abstraction that dominated painting in the decade before Lichtenstein's emergence, was the primary carrier of the artist's individuality and emotional authenticity — the unmediated trace of the hand and of the self.

By presenting the brushstroke as a printed sign, surrounded by the regulated Ben-Day dots of the background, Lichtenstein submitted the most personal of strokes to the most impersonal of treatments. The stroke was outlined in black; the paint's gesture was frozen into a reproducible form. The background dots provided a stable ground against which the apparent dynamism of the brushstrokes was measured and found to be equally constructed.

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