Modern Head #3 (C.93) is the most austere work in Roy Lichtenstein's Modern Head Series — a work in which the human head has been reduced to angular lines and geometric forms on a deep black ground, the white linecut strokes reading as a kind of technical diagram.

The figure is barely legible as human; it has become an abstract configuration that retains only the memory of its subject.

This degree of abstraction placed Modern Head #3 (C.93) in close contact with the Constructivist movement — the work of El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, and the artists of the Bauhaus who had pursued the reduction of visual form to its essential geometric components. The technical approach reinforced the conceptual point. Linecut with embossing on handmade Waterleaf paper produced a surface of considerable physical presence — the embossed strokes sitting proud of the sheet, the line incised with a precision that had no analogue in the gestural or painterly movements.

Lichtenstein was using the most mechanical and impersonal of his technical means to address a movement that had itself pursued the impersonal and the mechanical.

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