Haystack #4 (C.68) is among the most optically active works in Roy Lichtenstein's Haystack Series, its deep red and blue dot fields producing a surface that vibrates with a tension absent from the cooler or more monochromatic works in the group. The haystack sits in the lower half of the image, the dot-structured sky pressing down from above, the two colour fields meeting at a horizon drawn with the precision of a graphic designer's rule. The red and blue combination bring in specific historical resonances in 1969. These were the colours of Mondrian, of Léger, of a certain lineage of European modernism that had pursued the properties of primary colour as a philosophical project.

Lichtenstein was aware of these associations and his use of them here is not accidental — the Haystack Series was conducting an engagement not only into Impressionism but into the broader history of colour in modernist art, testing whether the Ben-Day dot could absorb the chromatic positions of multiple traditions.

Lichtenstein had by this point developed an output that operated on several registers, it addressed popular culture, art history, and the properties of the print medium itself.

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