Bull Head II (C.124) begins the transformation of the bull's head in earnest — the naturalistic form of Bull Head I now rendered in interlocking planes and diagonal hatching, the animal's features simplified into geometric zones of yellow and blue-grey. The distinctive horns remain legible, curving against a yellow ground, but the modelling of the earlier work has been replaced by unmodulated colour fields and mechanical marks that characterise Lichtenstein's mature print vocabulary.

Applying his own style to the bull's head produced a different dynamic than the Profile series. The head, with its pronounced features — horns, nostrils, the broad plane of the forehead — offered strong elements that could be isolated and abstracted independently, giving the decomposition a more feature-by-feature character than the body's more continuous dissolution. Bull Head II (C.124) exploited this, the horns retaining their distinctive curves even as the surrounding form became more geometric and the colour relationships more abstract than observed.

These three prints proceeded from the same conceptual basis as the Profile series — the homage to van Doesburg, the examination of abstraction as convention — but with the added resonance that came from working with a subject so heavily freighted with art-historical associations. Every step toward abstraction in the Bull Head prints was also a step away from Picasso, away from the charged symbolism that the bull's head had accumulated across the twentieth century. Bull Head II (C.124) was the beginning of that departure — the point at which Lichtenstein's analytical method began to assert itself over the weight of the subject's history.

For more information or to buy Bull Head II by Roy Lichtenstein, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.