The Expressionist Woodcut series began in 1978 at a dinner party in Los Angeles, where Roy Lichtenstein was seated near Robert Gore Rifkind, a lawyer with a serious collection of German Expressionist prints and illustrated books. Curiosity got the better of him, and Lichtenstein arranged a private visit to look through the collection properly, spending hours studying the actual woodcuts up close and talking printmaking with a collector who knew the material inside out. Two years later, back in LA on another trip, Lichtenstein called Rifkind and invited him over to see what he'd been making, the first pieces in a series translating the blocky, heavily worked style of German Expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein into his own graphic language, right down to picturing men, women and couples in the angular, woodcut-native forms the movement was known for.
Lichtenstein was direct about why woodcut specifically appealed to him after two decades of chasing a flat, machine-made look: "I want a mechanical image in my prints. But after a while, I was able to achieve that technical quality too easily. Woodcuts resist that. I like the way you have to fight against the block to get the image you want." That resistance shows up in a genuinely strange choice within the prints themselves, carving across the grain specifically to suppress the wood's natural texture, then painting in an exaggerated, oversized woodgrain pattern by hand, fighting the material's real character while faking an even bigger version of it. Ben-Day dots, the technique most associated with his work, disappear almost entirely here too, judged too soft and impressionistic for a medium built on hard lines, replaced instead by tight diagonal strokes that stand in for shadow and volume.
Reclining Nude, one of the seven prints in the group, marked new territory as Lichtenstein's first depiction of a nude figure in print. Morton A. Mort leaned furthest into the exaggerated woodgrain trick, its background built from a pattern that reads as torn straight from the block despite being entirely hand-applied. The series arrived alongside the American Indian Theme prints, made in the same handful of years and also cut from wood, together marking a genuinely rare stretch where Lichtenstein set aside his usual mechanical processes and let a physically resistant material shape the finished image.
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