Pablo Picasso created a series of 11 lithographic prints from 1945-1946 depicting a bull being reduced to its simplest form. Each print was a "state" that stripped away more details, ultimately revealing the essence of a bull as a primitive contour drawing. This reflected Picasso's view that art had become overcomplicated and he sought to distill it down to powerful, simple messages. Picasso spent his career progressively removing technique and complexity from his works to reveal the essential symbolic meanings, just as the bull series pared the animal down to its core image.

17. Pablo Picasso - Bulls 1-11
(05.12.1945 - 17.01.1946)
• Picasso’s most effectively rhetoric depiction of the bull is a series of
lithographic prints in which he makes a dramatic statement on the power of
simplicity. In 1945, Picasso worked tediously in a workshop creating a series
of eleven prints showing a bull going from a “plump” and detailed bull going
to a linear and schematic yet graceful outline of a bullish figure. This
process was described by Irving Lavin as being headed, “toward a
preternatural state of illuminated absent-mindedness and incoporeality—
before it had acquired the bulky accretions of Sophisticated European
culture,” (Lavin, 81). Each stage shearing off bit by bit, a process that the
lithograph pressman Célestin commented on: “ And I couldn’t help thinking
to myself: what I don’t understand is that he has ended up where he ought
to have begun! But for his part, he was looking for his bull,” (Levy, 120).
Each print was considered a “state” charged with its own reality until, at the
end the primitive contour drawing left was the essence of the bull—the same
mystical essence captured on the walls of Lascaux.

18. • This idea of primitivism goes back to the beginning of not only the
precocious knowledge that those prehistoric painters held in their
paintbrushes, but also the naiveté of children. This is precisely why, by the
end of Picasso’s career, he chose to essentially cut away all the
complexities of the art that had been established before him and leave the
world with powerful yet extremely simple messages. When asked about the
disappearance of the “marvelous” simplicity of primitive expression, Picasso
answered:
• This is due to the fact that man has ceased to be simple. He wanted to see
farther and so he lost the faculty of understanding that which he had within
reach of his vision…The same happens with a watch: it will go more or less
well; but if it goes at all it is not so bad. The worse begins the moment it falls
into the hands of a watchmaker…His manipulations will rob it of its purity,
and this will never return…just as the idea of art subsists; but we already
know what has been done to it by the schools…Its essence has evaporated,
and I make you a present of what remains. (Lavin, 84).

19. • This is an extremely powerful statement by Picasso that is a metaphor for
his life and career as an artist. His artistic brilliance comes from the
interpretation of the abstraction of his simplicity. To think that he spent his
life like the lithographic bull, throwing off layer after layer of technique and
classical balance (essentially humanness) to reveal the essential bull in his
art--trading his technical ability for symbolic meaning, is a dizzying
proposition. He not only created art but lived his art.
Images
• Pablo Picasso. The Bull. State I-IV 1945. Lithography. The Museum of
Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.
• http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/personal/reps/bulls/
• http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/nbisaria/archives/001985.html
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/renzodionigi/sets/72157622038648624/with/4844063528/
• http://behindthecreativity.tumblr.com/post/13577860911/pablo-picasso-bull-plates-i-xi-1945-46-a
presentation by sotos