Roy Lichtenstein Bull Profile Series and Bull Head Series Prints For Sale

Roy Lichtenstein spent the first months of 1973 building what he later called an abstraction lesson that wasn't really a lesson at all: six prints taking a bull's profile step by step from a recognisable animal down to a handful of flat coloured shapes, followed by three more prints doing the same thing to a bull's head. He was direct about the joke behind it: "The series pretends to be didactic; I'm giving you abstraction lessons. But nothing is more abstract than anything else to me. The first one is abstract; they're all abstract." The project deliberately echoed two earlier progression pieces: Pablo Picasso's eleven Bull lithographs from 1945–46, which simplified the same animal across eleven reworkings of a single stone, stripping it down step by step until almost nothing remained but a few essential lines, and Theo van Doesburg's Composition (The Cow), a 1916–17 De Stijl painting that ran the same trick on a cow decades before either Picasso or Lichtenstein touched the idea.

Picasso's own Bull series had already become something of a benchmark for what a progression toward abstraction could look like, so Lichtenstein's choice to revisit the same conceptual territory, using a bull's profile rather than Picasso's full standing animal, reads as a deliberate nod to that lineage as much as a joke about the word "abstract" itself. The bull kept returning across the rest of Lichtenstein's career in different forms: a Pitcher Triptych the year before, in 1972, a Cow Triptych the year after, in 1974, and the same progression device resurfacing as late as 1989 in his Tel Aviv Mural. That same year, he gave permission for the Bull Profile Series to be reproduced on a set of six porcelain plates, an edition of 50 plus artist's proofs, made specifically to raise money for a charity supporting the end of world hunger, an unusually direct piece of philanthropy for a series that started as a dry joke about how meaningless the word "abstract" really is.

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