Bull Head I

An early proponent of Pop art, Roy Lichtenstein sourced subjects for his paintings, drawings, and prints from popular and commercial culture, such as comic books and advertisements. He also drew inspiration from the history of art. In several series of prints he produced in the early 1970s, including Bull Head I-III, Lichtenstein portrayed the incremental progression of an image from representation to abstraction, using cows and bulls as subjects. Both the idea and imagery were derived from Pablo Picasso’s lithographic series The Bull (Le taureau), 1946, and Theo van Doesburg’s pencil studies for The Cow, 1916–17. Part homage and part parody, Lichtenstein’s print series challenged the modernist belief that universal truth could be revealed through methods of progressive abstraction. For Lichtenstein, there was no distinction between naturalism and abstraction, stating that “nothing is more abstract than anything else to me. The first one is abstract; they’re all abstract.”