Haystack #6 (C.70) is the final numbered work in Roy Lichtenstein's Haystack Series proper, set in deep burgundy — the haystack form pressing close to the edges of the work, the dot field dense and chromatic, the image at its most tonally saturated. The three state variants that follow (C.71, C.72, C.73) apply different colour relationships to the lithographic matrix: State I in yellow-olive, State II in blue-grey, State III in a warmer ochre ground. Taken together they make the point that the series format is not a record of observation but a system of permutations. Monet returned to his haystacks because each visit was unrepeatable — the light was different, the season had changed, the subject was genuinely new each time. Lichtenstein's states are matrix printed in different colours, the subject unchanged, the variation entirely controlled. The states make explicit what the whole series had been implying: that chromatic experience, which Impressionism presented as the record of irreducible individual perception, could be generated systematically, altered at will, achieved on demand.

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