Roy Lichtenstein’s Composition III (C.299), produced in 1996, continues the artist’s late exploration of music as a visual language, transforming the familiar structure of musical notation into a dynamic Pop abstraction. Where Composition I and Composition II rendered staves and notes with looping, interwoven energy, Composition III intensifies this effect, presenting an even more intricate lattice of curving musical lines that sweep rhythmically across the surface.

This work captures the tension between order and improvisation. The staff lines—so rigid and mechanical in traditional notation—bend, twist, and overlap with playful elasticity, suggesting the vitality of sound in motion. The black notes scattered across these lines no longer function as readable music but as graphic symbols of rhythm and sound, frozen mid-performance. In this way, Lichtenstein both deconstructs and reimagines the act of musical composition, aligning it with his broader interest in the mediation of visual signs.

The use of color—patches of teal, red, blue, cream, and his hallmark Ben-Day dots—injects syncopation into the otherwise linear design, creating visual "beats" that parallel musical accents. These vivid blocks of color punctuate the composition like bursts of sound, highlighting Lichtenstein’s ability to translate auditory experience into a purely optical encounter. By doing so, he offers a witty commentary on the abstraction of music: though inherently temporal, it is here reconfigured as an eternal Pop tableau.

As with his Brushstroke series, Composition III can be seen as a meta-commentary on the creative process. Just as the brushstroke became a symbol of painterly gesture, the musical staff here becomes a symbol of structured creativity, distorted by the artist’s hand into something at once chaotic and harmonious. The playful distortion of the staves mirrors the improvisational qualities of jazz, a genre Lichtenstein admired for its complexity and spontaneity.

Completed during the final decade of his career, the Composition series represents Lichtenstein’s mature synthesis of Pop Art’s iconic strategies with a deep engagement in abstraction and the sensory experience of art. Composition III demonstrates how Lichtenstein used the familiar symbols of music not merely as subject matter but as vehicles for exploring the interplay of structure, rhythm, and perception.