Blonde (C.153) introduced the female figure into Roy Lichtenstein's Surrealist Series through an approach that drew on the Surrealist tradition of the fragmented or transformed female body — the figure disrupted, displaced, or rendered strange.. The blonde hair, rendered in bold yellow brushstroke forms, dominated the picture, the figure assembled from elements that suggested but did not fully constitute a coherent body.

The blonde woman had been one of Western art's most loaded subjects long before Surrealism claimed her — from the Venus of classical painting through the femmes fatales of Symbolism and the dislocated, eroticised female forms that ran through Ernst, Magritte, and Dalí. Lichtenstein's version traced a different lineage: his blonde had come from the romance and drama comics of postwar America, the wide-eyed, perfectly rendered women of mass-market illustration who had populated his early paintings and established his reputation. The Surrealist Series placed this figure — already a sign rather than a person, already a product of convention — into Surrealism's characteristic setting of spatial ambiguity and narrative dislocation, where she became strange in a different way than she had been strange before.

This displacement was the Surrealist Series' central operation. Lichtenstein was examining what happened when Surrealism's conventions — its spatial ambiguity, its dissolution of conventional figure-ground relationships, its juxtaposition of incongruous elements — were applied to subjects drawn from his own established territory. Blonde (C.153) tested this with the most familiar of his figures, the result a work that was recognisably Lichtenstein and recognisably Surrealist without resolving into either — a hybrid that demonstrated how completely different systems could be absorbed into his own without losing their essential properties.

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