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Throughout his career Cornell worked in series. In the early 1960s he created several collages using photographs of nude pin-ups from magazines, colored blue, and "wearing" diagrams of constellations. He referred to these collages in his diaries as "blue nudes."

Many of Cornell's works feature images of women, and descriptions of waitresses, shopgirls, and "teeners," young women he saw on the streets of Flushing, pepper his diary entries. Cornell's interest in women seemed to be very innocent. The blue color that permeates this image, along with the constellations in the woman's braid, mitigates any overtly erotic context and makes the nude appear to be part of an ideal, heavenly realm.