Bull IV (C.119) is the point in Roy Lichtenstein's Bull Profile Series at which the bull's recognisable form begins to give way to something more purely abstract. The body has been further simplified into broadplanes — pink, red, yellow, blue — the anatomical details of the earlier prints reduced to abstract colour zones, the image reading more as a geometric arrangement than as the depiction of an animal. The horizontal format reinforces this shift, the forms spreading across the sheet with a lateral energy the more contained earlier works had not exhibited.

The pink and red palette was a significant departure from the blue and yellow that had dominated the earlier works, introducing a warmth that gave the image a different register even as it became formally more abstract. Lichtenstein's series consistently demonstrated that colour could carry meaning independently of form — that the same formal structure felt different in different chromatic keys — and Bull IV (C.119) made this argument within the progression of a single series.

By this stage in the sequence, Lichtenstein's debt to Theo van Doesburg's original abstraction studies was fully apparent. The comparison between the 1916–1917 De Stijl demonstration and Lichtenstein's 1973 reprising of it highlighted how completely the terms of the debate had changed in the intervening half century. Where van Doesburg's abstraction was a utopian project — the reduction of form to essential geometric truth — Lichtenstein's was an analytical one, examining the process of abstraction itself as a convention with its own history and assumptions.

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