Roy Lichtenstein’s Haystack II (C. 66) continues his Pop reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s famous Haystacks series, replacing the Impressionist’s vibrant atmospheric light with a starkly mechanized visual system. Here, the haystack motif emerges—or rather, hides—within a dense grid of red and blue Ben-Day dots set against a purple field, creating an optical push and pull between abstraction and representation.

While Monet sought to capture how light shifts across time, Lichtenstein’s version underscores how meaning shifts across different modes of visual reproduction. In Haystack II, the pastoral subject becomes secondary to the graphic process itself. The haystacks nearly dissolve into the field of dots, their outlines perceptible only after careful looking, emphasizing the tension between recognition and erasure.

The work functions as both homage and critique. By adopting Monet’s canonical subject but translating it into the idiom of commercial printing, Lichtenstein questions the role of originality and artistic genius in an age of mass media. Where Monet’s brushstrokes vibrated with natural light, Lichtenstein’s dots vibrate with industrial regularity.

The palette of red, blue, and purple also speaks to Pop Art’s engagement with the colors of advertising, packaging, and mass production. Instead of evoking the rural French countryside, Haystack II immerses the viewer in the artificial hues of modern consumer culture.

Ultimately, Haystack II is not about haystacks at all—it is about how images are perceived, mediated, and constructed. By filtering Monet’s imagery through the lens of mechanical reproduction, Lichtenstein transforms an Impressionist study of fleeting moments into a Pop meditation on permanence, systems, and coded vision.

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