The Mask (C.227) took the Brushstroke Figures Series' central proposition — the face assembled from painterly marks — to its most object-like extreme. Where Blue Face retained enough of the figure's familiar structure to read as a face being described, this picture pushed toward something more schematic: a mask rather than a head, the features present as constructions rather than descriptions, the dot-field ground pressing forward with the same weight as the brushstroke forms that constituted the face itself.

The mask had accumulated considerable art-historical weight by the time Lichtenstein reached it. African masks had fractured Picasso's approach to the face in 1907, the encounter producing Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and with it a new understanding of how a face could be depicted as a structure of planes and angles rather than an integrated whole. Ensor and the German Expressionists had used the carnival mask to strip social identity away, leaving something more unsettling beneath. Lichtenstein's version absorbed none of these associations directly — his mask was built from the same brushstroke vocabulary he had been developing since 1965, the marks that had once depicted gesture now depicting a face that was itself a kind of performance. The Mask (C.227) made that layering — mark as gesture, gesture as face, face as mask — the explicit subject of the work.

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