Bull V (C.120) advances the Bull Profile Series to the point of near-abstraction — the bull's form now almost entirely dissolved into rectangular colour planes and geometric elements, the original subject surviving only in the overall arrangement and in certain residual marks that recall the animal's outline. Yellow dominates, with blocks of blue, white, and black distributed in a pattern that echoes De Stijl's grid-based organisation without directly reproducing it.

The proximity to Mondrian was unmistakable and deliberate. Lichtenstein had looked closely at Mondrian's work throughout his career, and the late stages of the Bull series brought that attention into sharp focus — the bull's decomposition arriving at a destination that looked remarkably like Mondrian's reductive paintings of the 1920s and 1930s. This convergence was the series' most pointed discovery: that the systematic abstraction of a representational subject, taken to its logical conclusion, produced something indistinguishable from non-objective painting.

The implication ran in both directions. If Pop Art's language could absorb a bull and deposit it at Mondrian, the journey of abstraction was less a teleological progress toward pure form and more a set of positions that could be traversed from either end. Bull V (C.120) made this visible by placing the viewer so close to the abstract endpoint that the distance from the naturalistic Bull I felt both enormous and entirely logical.

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