Bull VI (C.121) is the terminus of Roy Lichtenstein's Bull Profile Series — the point at which the bull has been completely dissolved into geometric abstraction. The image presents a grid of yellow, blue, white, and black rectangles arranged with a cool, systemic order that owes everything to De Stijl and nothing, apparently, to the animal that generated it. Only the knowledge of what preceded it allows the viewer to read the image as the conclusion of a representational sequence rather than as a non-objective work.

This was the series' final argument. The bull — one of the oldest subjects in the Western visual tradition, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the academic life drawing class — had been absorbed entirely into the geometric vocabulary of early twentieth-century abstraction. Roy Lichtenstein's demonstration aligned with van Doesburg's original but drew different conclusions from the same formal journey. Where De Stijl had presented abstraction as a discovery — the essential truth beneath the accidental surface of natural form — Lichtenstein presented it as a convention, as arbitrary in its way as the naturalistic engraving from which the series had begun.

Bull VI (C.121) closed a series that stood as one of the most methodologically transparent arguments in Lichtenstein's print catalogue — a progression from representation to abstraction made visible across six works, both a homage to the modernist tradition and a cool examination of its assumptions. The bull was gone, dissolved into the grid, but the question it had posed remained entirely open: whether abstraction was a destination or simply another place to begin.

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