Roy Lichtenstein was an American pop artist best known for his boldly-colored parodies of comic strips and advertisements. In the 1960s, Lichtenstein became a leading figure of the new Pop Art movement. Inspired by advertisements and comic strips, Lichtenstein's bright, graphic works parodied American popular culture and the art world itself.
About Bull Profile Series, Plate III – Roy Lichtenstein – Pop Art Painting
Over the course of six prints, Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997) progressively simplifies and abstracts a Holstein cow, a sequence only comprehensible when the series is seen in its entirety. Lichtenstein directly quotes Picasso’s lithographic series The Bull (Le taureau), 1946, and Theo van Doesburg’s pencil studies for The Cow, 1916–1917, in which bovines are incrementally rendered abstract. These precedents testify to the modernist belief that universal truth could be revealed through distillation and abstraction. Lichtenstein, though, parodies this faith by calling into question the presumed distinction between “realistic” and “abstract” depictions. The stylized, wavy, black patterning in Bull I that calls to mind Old Master woodcuts or line engravings reverberates with the crisp, diagonal cross-hatching in the subsequent prints. This visual rhyme calls attention to the fact that, as Lichtenstein put it, “nothing is more abstract than anything else to me. The first one is abstract; they’re all abstract.”
About the Posters
Bull Profile Series, Plate III – Roy Lichtenstein – Pop Art Painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Our posters are produced on acid-free 220 GSM papers using archival inks to guarantee that they last a lifetime without fading or loss of color. All posters include a sufficent white border around the image to allow for future framing, if desired. Product will be shipped in 2-3 days