Bull I (C.116) opens Roy Lichtenstein's Bull Profile Series with the most conventionally representational image in the group — a bull rendered in fine cross-hatched lines on white, its form solid and recognisable, its stance classical. The image draws on the tradition of natural history illustration and agricultural engraving, the kind of precise figurative draughtsmanship that had populated encyclopaedias and farming manuals since the eighteenth century — a bull drawn as a bull should be drawn, and it is this fidelity to convention that gives the work its function as the starting point for an extraordinary formal sequence.

The Bull Profile Series was Lichtenstein's most explicit examination of abstraction as a process. Beginning with Bull I (C.116) and proceeding across six prints, the series systematically decomposed the bull's form, passing it through successively more abstract states until, by Bull VI, the original subject had been almost entirely dissolved into geometric elements. The series was a direct homage to Theo van Doesburg's sequence of studies abstracting a cow, produced in 1916–1917, in which the same progression from representation to abstraction was demonstrated as a manifesto for De Stijl. Roy Lichtenstein repeated the exercise half a century later, asking what the demonstration looked like from the vantage point of Pop Art.

Bull I (C.116) is the necessary foundation for this argument — the point of representational fullness from which abstraction departs. Its cross-hatching, borrowed from trade engraving rather than fine art drawing, established from the outset that this was a bull filtered through a representational convention, not a bull observed directly. The decomposition that followed was already implicit in that choice.

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