Reclining Nude (C.172) opens Roy Lichtenstein's Expressionist Woodcut Series, produced in 1980 as his most direct encounter with German Expressionism — and specifically with the woodcut as the Expressionist generation's chosen medium. The Brücke artists — Kirchner, Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff — had made the woodcut central to their practice between 1905 and 1914, using its physical energy and gestural directness to produce images of immediate emotional force. Lichtenstein opened the series with the subject most associated with that tradition: the reclining nude, rendered here in the angular, physically assertive marks of the woodblock, the figure assembled from broad blue and orange planes against a white ground.

The embossing that characterised every work in the series added a literal physical dimension that reinforced the woodcut's material presence — the embossed marks sitting proud of the Arches Cover paper, the print acquiring a relief quality that gave it an object-like presence. Lichtenstein had used embossing across multiple series to introduce physical complexity into his compositions; in the Expressionist Woodcut Series it carried a more specific charge, making the evidence of the printing process tangible in a way that reinforced the Expressionist tradition's own insistence on the physical trace of the artist's hand.

Reclining Nude (C.172) was the work in the series most directly engaged with the Expressionist tradition's figural subject matter. The nude in the Expressionist woodcut had been a charged and complex subject — simultaneously a study in compositional organisation and a vehicle for the emotional directness that Expressionism claimed as its defining quality.

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