The transformation accelerates in Bull III (C.118). The bull's body is now fragmented into interlocking planes of yellow, blue, and white, the continuous outline of the earlier prints broken into segments, the animal's form beginning to dissolve into the geometric vocabulary of Cubism. Head, shoulder, haunch, and leg are still present but are now separate elements rather than parts of a unified body — the bull disassembled and reassembled as a picture.

Lichtenstein's dialogue with Cubism was explicit here in a way it had not been in the earlier Bull prints. The fragmentation of form, the simultaneous presentation of multiple viewpoints, the interlocking colour planes: these were the formal strategies that Picasso and Braque had developed between 1908 and 1914, and Lichtenstein was deploying them with a directness that acknowledged the source while pulling it through his own language. Bull III (C.118) was Cubism processed through Ben-Day dots and the conventions of mass-produced print — the historical avant-garde absorbed and re-examined from a Pop Art position.

The diagonal hatching that had structured Bull II now appeared as one element among several, its regularity in tension with the more varied colour fields surrounding it. The yellow ground was a new introduction — warm, pushing the bull's fragments forward against the picture plane. By this point in the series the progression from Bull I's naturalism was entirely visible, and the distance still to travel toward the near-total abstraction of the later prints was equally apparent.

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