Head (C.177) was the most reduced work in Roy Lichtenstein's Expressionist Woodcut Series — the subject stripped to its simplest form, a single head examined in isolation, the angular woodcut marks building a face concentrated on the properties of the Expressionist mark itself rather than on the compositional relationships between multiple figures or figure and setting. The embossing on Arches Cover paper gave the head a physical presence that the isolation of the subject made particularly apparent.

The single head as a subject in Expressionist art had been among the most psychologically charged of formats — the face examined directly, without compositional distraction, the marks carrying the full weight of the Expressionist claim to emotional truth. Kirchner's head studies, Heckel's angular faces, the woodcut portraits of the Brücke artists: these were works in which the physical mark and the depicted face were in the most direct possible relationship, the evidence of the artist's hand and the evidence of a human face occupying the same space.

Lichtenstein's Head (C.177) placed this relationship under the same analytical scrutiny that had characterised all his art-historical dialogues. The face was present as an assembled construction — built from marks identical in type to those used for the nude figures, the couple, and the student — the claims of individual psychological truth that the Expressionist portrait had made nowhere supported by what was actually there. Head (C.177) was the Expressionist Woodcut Series at its most concentrated: a single face, examined through marks that produced the impression of expressive intensity while withholding the emotional content that Expressionism had claimed those marks necessarily carried.

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