The deep crimson and rose palette of Haystack #5 (C.69) gives it an intensity that distinguishes it within Roy Lichtenstein's Haystack Series — a work in which the chromatic pressure is high enough that the haystack form seems almost to emerge from the colour rather than to sit upon it. The dot fields are dense, the contrast between figure and ground compressed, the surface more agitated than the spare early works in the series.

This chromatic intensity had a clear precedent in Monet's late Haystack canvases, in which the fading autumn light produced surfaces of saturated orange and red that pushed toward abstraction. Lichtenstein's version achieves something comparable through entirely different means — not the observation of natural light but the considered stacking of dot patterns in a range that Monet would have recognised as analogous to his own, even as the method behind it was irreconcilable with Impressionist working. The Haystack Series as a whole was Lichtenstein's most sustained engagement with the serial format as an artistic position. Monet had used the series to demonstrate that perception was inexhaustible — that the same subject offered endless variation to the attentive eye.

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