Bull Head I (C.123) opens a parallel sequence to the Bull Profile Series, applying the same logic of progressive abstraction to the bull's head rather than its full body. Rendered in yellow and black against a yellow ground, with green marks suggesting foliage and a dot-patterned sky above, the head is depicted with the simplified directness of a natural history illustration — recognisable, formal, the subject established clearly before the process of transformation begins.

The decision to produce a second sequence working from the head alone, concurrent with the Profile series, demonstrated the systematic ambition of Roy Lichtenstein's approach to this subject. Where the Bull Profile prints tested abstraction applied to the full body — the problem of anatomical form in its entirety — the Bull Head prints focused the same scrutiny on a single element. The head, with its distinct features and strong silhouette, offered a different set of questions from the body's broader compositional mass.

Bull Head I (C.123) was also an implicit acknowledgement of the long tradition of the bull's head as an art-historical subject. From Picasso's Guernica to the sculptural and ceramic bull heads that ran throughout his career, the bull's head had been among the most charged symbols in twentieth-century modernism — an emblem of animal force, of Spain, of the confrontation between civilisation and nature. Lichtenstein's version approached the subject through the lens of natural history illustration rather than symbolic resonance, and then proceeded to dismantle even that starting point through the abstraction sequence that followed.

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