Imperfect 63⅜ x 88⅞ inches (C.224) carried the most varied palette in the Imperfect Series, the colour relationships between the intersecting forms producing a warmth that the cooler, more restrained works in the group had avoided. Triangles and angular fields press across the surface in multiple directions simultaneously, dot-field areas sitting against smooth grey and hatched sections, the whole surface active without any single element dominating.

Albers had spent decades demonstrating that colour relationships were never fixed — that the same hue looked different depending on what surrounded it, that the eye's reading of a colour was always a negotiation between adjacent tones. Lichtenstein's Imperfect works drew on that understanding without illustrating it, the range of tones here producing readings that shifted depending on where attention fell. The imperfection in this case was chromatic as much as structural — too many hues, too many spatial readings, the surface refusing the kind of singular, declarative statement that the Minimalists and hard-edge painters had pursued as the mark of a resolved work.

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