Modern Head #4 (C.94) is the only work in Roy Lichtenstein's Modern Head Series to be printed on metal — a lithograph on engraved and anodised aluminium, the head set in blue, grey, and white against a ground carrying a quality of light that paper cannot replicate. Modern Head #4 depicts a head in profile, the forms clearly derived from the machine-age aesthetic of Art Deco and early twentieth-century industrial design, the aluminium support reinforcing the work's alignment with materials associated with manufacturing rather than fine art.

The use of aluminium was the most radical material decision in the Modern Head Series, and one of the most striking in Lichtenstein's print catalogue.

By printing on metal, Lichtenstein made the work's kinship with industrial production literal — this was not a print that referred to mechanical processes but one that was materially indistinguishable from the objects those processes produced. The engraved surface, the anodised finish: these were the evidence of industrial manufacture, present in a work that claimed the status of fine art print.

This tension between fine art and industrial production had been at the heart of Lichtenstein's output since the early 1960s, but Modern Head #4 (C.94) pressed it further than almost any previous work.

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