Red Barn (C.89), made in 1969, represented a significant expansion of the subjects Lichtenstein was willing to submit to his working approach. The rural American barn — one of the most thoroughly codified images in American popular culture, a symbol of agrarian life processed through a century of illustration, advertising, and folk art — was here built through open colour fields, bold outlines, and Ben-Day dot patterning.

The image operated on two levels, immediately and unmistakably a barn — the familiar form, the red walls, the distinctive silhouette — while being an examination of how that familiarity was constructed. His working approach dissolved any illusion of observed reality into its printed components: the red of the barn was the red of the screenprint ink, as bold and assertive as any primary colour in his comic-book work, the sky above it structured by dots that declared their own artificiality.

By bringing the same critical attention he had applied to comic books and Impressionism to this American vernacular image, Lichtenstein extended his reach into the territory of national landscape imagery.

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