Peace Through Chemistry III (C.98) is the most spare work in Roy Lichtenstein's Peace Through Chemistry Series — a horizontal image in black and white in which the industrial elements are arranged with a symmetry that gives the image an almost emblematic quality. The absence of colour, and the consistency of the dot fields against the white ground, produces an effect close to a technical schematic — the series at its most literal in its source material, and most formally resolved.

Lichtenstein was drawn throughout his career to images that had acquired the status of signs — the comic-book panel, the Impressionist haystack — and the technical diagram occupied a similar position in post-war American culture. It was the emblem of industrial modernity, the shorthand for scientific optimism that had defined the post-war decades.

By rendering it with the solemnity of a heraldic device, Peace Through Chemistry III (C.98) made that emblematic status visible and asked what it implied. The lithographic medium, used here without the screenprint overlay that marked some works in the series, gave the image a tonal unity that reinforced its balance.

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