Morton A. Mort (C.178) closed Roy Lichtenstein's Expressionist Woodcut Series with its most specifically named subject — a figure identified not by type or generic description but by a particular name, the absurdist specificity of the name declaring its own fiction while asserting the form of individual identity. The name itself — its alliterative mundanity, its American suburban register — was a form of deadpan humour, a declaration that this Expressionist figure was not the tortured Central European intellectual of the original tradition but a different kind of person placed in a different cultural context entirely.

This naming strategy was the series' most direct critical gesture. Throughout, Lichtenstein had submitted the conventions of German Expressionism to analytical scrutiny without commenting explicitly on the cultural translation involved. Morton A. Mort (C.178) made that translation explicit through the subject's name: the Expressionist figure placed in an American suburban identity, the claims of universal psychological truth that the movement had made for its images tested against a specifically located, specifically named, and rather ordinary person.

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