In late 1945, Pablo Picasso sat down with a lithographic stone and began one of the most deliberate artistic experiments of his career. Over eleven separate plates, he drew and redrew the same subject — a bull — each time stripping it further and further down. The result was a series simply titled “The Bull,” a sequence of prints that moves from a full, muscular animal to a spare outline made of just a handful of lines. It stands as one of the defining works of his 1940s output and one of the clearest windows into how Picasso actually thought about form.
The bull was not a random subject. Picasso returned to it throughout his life, loading it with different meanings depending on the work. At various points it represented the Spanish people, fascism and brutality, raw virility, or even Picasso’s own self-image. He refused to fix a single interpretation on it, and that deliberate openness is part of what made it such a useful symbol for him to keep revisiting. In this series, the animal is less a symbol and more a problem to be solved — a form to be understood from the inside out.
Plate 1 is immediate and confident. Painted in lithographic ink with a brush, the bull is alive on the page — its weight, texture, and energy all present. This is the foundation from which every subsequent plate departs.
Rather than moving toward abstraction right away, Picasso first pushed in the opposite direction. On Plate 2, he added bulk and mass to the animal, amplifying its physical presence to give it an almost mythological weight. Only after building the bull up did he begin taking it apart.
On Plate 3, Picasso introduced a lithographic crayon and began cutting into the bull’s form with lines that follow its muscles and skeleton. He dissected the animal much like a butcher working through a carcass — a comparison he reportedly joked about with the printers. The detailed surface texture this produced drew comparisons to Dürer’s famous rhinoceros print.
Picasso once said, “A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions.” Plate 4 makes that philosophy visible. He began flattening the animal into planes, removing detail and replacing it with structure. Lithography suited this process perfectly — unlike many printmaking methods, it allows an artist to both add to and erase from an image with relative ease.
On Plate 5, Picasso erased entire sections of the bull to shift its balance. By removing mass from certain areas, he reorganized the visual relationship between the front and rear of the animal, forcing the remaining lines to carry more of the weight.
Plate 6 introduced a new head and tail, reshaped to match the increasingly stylized body. Picasso added curves to soften the network of crossing lines, and the line of the back became a flowing wave of energy running from shoulder to flank. Three structural lines converge at the bull’s center of balance — evidence that Picasso was working out the physics of the animal as much as its appearance.
Having used the construction lines to understand the bull’s balance, Picasso discarded them on Plate 7. What remained was enclosed in a taut, clean outline. The scaffolding had done its job and was no longer needed.
By Plate 8, the bull was almost entirely a line drawing. The head, legs, and tail were reconfigured again to match the spare logic of the evolving image. Each change was not decoration — it was a correction, a step toward the most accurate possible statement of what a bull essentially is.
Plate 9 completed the move to pure line. All remaining areas of shading were erased — except for one. The bull’s reproductive organ kept its tone, a deliberate choice to mark the animal’s gender within an otherwise flat drawing.
On the second-to-last plate, Picasso removed even more of the line work, leaving only the shapes and forces that were truly essential to identifying the animal. The bull was now nearly abstract, yet unmistakably itself.
The final plate is a spare, carefully considered outline. Every line that remains earned its place through ten prior stages of building, cutting, and erasing. Nothing is accidental. The series as a whole demonstrates that simplicity, for Picasso, was not the starting point — it was the destination, arrived at only through deep understanding of the form beneath.
