The Couple (C.175) was the most emotionally legible work in Roy Lichtenstein's Expressionist Woodcut Series — two figures in close proximity, the subject of the couple a recurring motif in Expressionist art that had been used by Kirchner, Munch, and their contemporaries to explore the tensions of intimate human relationship. The two figures, rendered in the angular woodcut marks of the series, were clearly distinct from each other while occupying a shared space — their proximity suggesting intimacy, the tension between their marks suggesting the complexity of that intimacy.

The couple as a subject in Expressionist art had been inseparable from a specific set of concerns about modern life: the dissolution of traditional social bonds, the alienation of individuals from each other, the difficulty of connection in the industrialised city. Lichtenstein's version existed in no specific social context — the setting was abstract, the figures generic rather than specifically characterised — but the subject carried its Expressionist associations into the Pop Art context he had constructed around it.

By submitting the Expressionist couple to his own analytical scrutiny, Lichtenstein asked whether the emotional content that Expressionism had claimed for its representations of human relationship was a property of the subject or of the tradition through which it was represented. The Couple (C.175) suggested, characteristically, that it was a property of the tradition — that the angular marks and the physical energy of the woodcut produced an impression of tension and intimacy regardless of whether they were motivated by the emotional directness that Expressionism had claimed as their source.

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