Bull Head III (C.125) brings the Bull Head sequence to its conclusion — the animal's head dissolved into a near-abstract arrangement of geometric forms and colour planes, the horns now reduced to angular lines, the face to a pattern of yellow and blue rectangles and arcs. A small red square, isolated in the upper right, has detached from any representational function and floats as a purely abstract element, the image standing at the boundary between the figurative and the non-objective.

By the final work in the sequence, Roy Lichtenstein had demonstrated with the bull's head what he had demonstrated with the full body: that the systematic abstraction of a representational subject, taken through the conventions of a specific language, arrived at a destination indistinguishable from non-objective composition. The abstract endpoint of Bull Head III (C.125) could as easily have been reached by a Constructivist working from geometric principles as by a Pop Art printmaker working from a bull.

Lichtenstein was not claiming that representation and abstraction were the same thing — he was demonstrating that they used the same formal toolkit, that the conventions of each were more similar than the history of twentieth-century art had suggested. The Bull Profile and Bull Head prints, taken together, constitute his most methodical examination of that proposition, and Bull Head III (C.125) closes them with the quiet authority of works that let the sequence speak for itself.

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