Green Face (C.232) used colour to produce a small but genuine surprise — the face assembled in green and grey tones, the non-naturalistic palette announcing its own artificiality before the figure had fully registered. The oval sweep of yellow brushstrokes framing the head gave the picture a compositional coherence the series' more scattered works had avoided, everything pressing inward toward the centre where the face accumulated from dot-field passages, dark brushed marks, and the green that gave the work its title.

The green face sat in a lineage Lichtenstein had been building since the early 1960s — the yellow haystack, the blue cathedral, the declaratively non-naturalistic colour applied to a subject with which it had no natural relationship. That mismatch was always the same argument: that the colours we accept as natural in representation are choices, not descriptions, as constructed as the green that made this face momentarily unreadable. The Brushstroke Figures Series had worked through warm and cool palettes, gold grounds, grey grounds, and now this — a face the colour of foliage, its strangeness wearing off after a moment of looking, which was precisely the point.

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