Pablo Picasso created ‘Bull’ around the Christmas of 1945. ‘Bull’ is a suite of eleven lithographs that have become a master class in how to develop an artwork from the academic to the abstract. In this series of images, all pulled from a single stone, he visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essential presence through a progressive analysis of its form. Each plate is a successive stage in an investigation to find the absolute ‘spirit’ of the beast.
One of my favorite (possibly apocryphal) stories is about a woman who asked Picasso to draw her picture. He took 5 minutes and gave it back to her, telling her it would cost twenty thousand dollars. She said “What! It only took you 5 minutes!” He replied, “No, it took me my whole life.” This demonstrates why.
