Two Apples (C.198) sets two apple forms side by side in a horizontal arrangement — both indicated by the characteristic circular outline rendered in overlapping woodcut marks, one in cool green and blue, the other in warm red and yellow — the picture placing the series' two dominant chromatic tendencies in direct proximity for the first time. Where earlier works had committed to one palette or the other, this one held both simultaneously, the contrast between the cool left form and the warm right one giving the picture a tension the single-apple works could not produce.

The pairing of objects within a still life had carried chromatic purpose since the Dutch Golden Age — Heda and Claesz arranging their pewter and glass with precise attention to how tonal relationships between objects generated spatial depth and coherence. Cézanne took that interest further, using the colour relationships between fruit on a table to test how a surface could hold together without recourse to linear perspective. Lichtenstein's two apples inherited this tradition while stripping it of its atmospheric ambitions — the warm and cool readings placed side by side not to create depth or coherence but to make the difference between them the explicit subject of the picture, colour examined as directly as the woodcut mark that carried it.

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