Modern Head #2 (C.92) is among the most dramatically composed works in Roy Lichtenstein's Modern Head Series. Made on black handmade Waterleaf paper using lithograph, linecut, and embossing, the work places a schematised female head against a deep dark ground — pale lines, a wedge of yellow dot pattern, a crescent moon form — the image emerging from darkness rather than sitting on a neutral ground.

The use of black paper was unusual in Lichtenstein's print output and gave Modern Head #2 (C.92) a nocturnal, almost mysterious quality that distinguished it sharply from the brightly coloured works that dominated his catalogue.

Lichtenstein was never an artist who relied on a single technical approach, and the Modern Head Series demonstrated that range — each of the five works using a different combination of media and support, yielding a series that was technically varied as well as conceptually unified. The Modern Head Series arrived at a moment when Lichtenstein's attention to the history of modernism was becoming more methodical. Having addressed Impressionism in the Cathedral and Haystack series, he turned here to the Cubist and Constructivist movements that had followed it — testing whether the critical tools he had developed through Pop Art could open up these tendencies as they had opened up Impressionism.

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