Yellow Still Life (C.133) closes Roy Lichtenstein's Six Still Lifes Series with the most formally spare work in the group — a simple arrangement of fruit and cheese on a surface, rendered almost entirely in yellow and grey against a white ground, the composition stripped of the layered complexity and multiple objects that characterised the earlier works. The reduction was deliberate: having worked through increasingly complex arrangements across the series, Lichtenstein ended with a work that returned to the genre's most essential elements.

The yellow palette gave Yellow Still Life (C.133) a warmth and directness that distinguished it from the richer, more varied compositions that came before it. Roy Lichtenstein's use of monochrome or near-monochrome colour schemes across his print series — the yellow Haystack #1, the blue Cathedral #6 — was always a deliberate argument about the independence of colour from subject: the demonstration that the same objects, treated in different chromatic keys, produced fundamentally different works. Yellow Still Life (C.133) applied this logic to the still life genre, the monochrome palette giving the familiar objects an almost abstract quality.

As the closing work in the Six Still Lifes, Yellow Still Life (C.133) recalled the reductive logic that had ended the Haystack series and the Bull series — the tendency in Lichtenstein's serial work to move toward formal simplification at the conclusion of a sequence that had built toward complexity. The series had examined the still life tradition from multiple angles; it ended by examining what remained when most of the tradition's apparatus had been stripped away.

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