Entablature IV (C.141) introduced the strongest colour contrast in Roy Lichtenstein's Entablature Series to this point — a deep navy blue band set against the cream and pink of the architectural ornament, the bold chromatic division giving the work an abruptness that the warmer, more continuous palettes of the earlier prints had avoided. The navy anchored the picture with a weight that evoked the sombre authority of neoclassical civic architecture at its most imposing.

The deep blue brought the Entablature prints into proximity with the tradition of colour field painting that had been central to American art since the 1950s. Lichtenstein was consistently aware of this — his work had always maintained a dialogue with abstraction even when it was most overtly figurative — and the strong blue band of Entablature IV (C.141) introduced an element that could have come from a Rothko or a Newman as easily as from an architectural photograph.

This double reading — architectural fragment and abstract colour study — ran through the Entablature Series as a whole. The entablature, stripped of its structural function and read as pure ornament, was a horizontal band of decorative marks not unlike the colour bands that structured much abstract painting. By photographing these elements and pulling them through his own style,, Lichtenstein revealed a kinship between classical decoration and modernist abstraction that neither tradition would have acknowledged. Entablature IV (C.141) makes that kinship most explicit, the blue band belonging equally to both.

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