By 1988 the geometric abstraction of the previous three decades had become as much an art-historical inheritance as Impressionism or Cubism — a body of work with its own heroes, its own critical apparatus, its own claim to have solved certain problems about how colour and form could operate on a surface. Imperfect 67 x 79⅞ inches (C.222) approached that inheritance the way Lichtenstein had always approached inherited modes: not through parody or homage but through close attention to where the logic held and where it didn't.

The composition here worked through curves as much as angles — a large yellow arc sweeping across the lower left, grey planes tilting behind it, a dense diagonal hatched triangle pressing down from the upper centre, smaller elements of red dot-field, teal, and pale blue fragmenting the upper right. The curve was the disruptive element: Constructivism and hard-edge abstraction had largely avoided it, the straight edge and the right angle being the forms through which those movements had pursued their ideals of clarity and control. Lichtenstein's insertion of the arc into a composition otherwise built on straight lines and angular planes was the imperfection the title promised — not an accident but a structural provocation, the one element the system couldn't absorb.

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