Figures with Rope (C.152) opened Roy Lichtenstein's Surrealist Series, produced in 1978 — his most sustained examination of Surrealism's conventions: the dreamlike juxtapositions, biomorphic forms, and spatial dislocations that had characterised European Surrealist art of the 1920s and 1930s. The composition presents interlocking biomorphic figures and a coiled rope, the forms rendered in Lichtenstein's arcyhtypal style against the diagonal hatching ground that characterised the series throughout.

The Surrealist movement had been among the most influential in twentieth-century art, and its legacy — the dream image, the uncanny object, the displacement of the familiar — had been thoroughly absorbed into American popular culture by the late 1970s. Lichtenstein's approach followed the same method he had applied to Impressionism, Cubism, and architectural decoration: identifying a style and movement and examining it through his own terms. Figures with Rope (C.152) drew on the formal territory of Miró and Arp — the rounded biomorphic forms, the suggestion of bodily shapes that resisted anatomical reading — and submitted them to the precision of lithograph on Arches 88 paper.

The rope introduced a specific Surrealist motif — the bound object, the constraining cord, the suggestion of tension and resistance — into a composition whose biomorphic forms already implied bodily presence.

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