The artwork “Bull (plate V)” by Pablo Picasso, created in 1945, is a notable piece done in the medium of lithography on paper and is part of the art movement known as Cubism. This animal painting falls within a larger body of work entitled “Eleven developments of a lithograph.” The piece is currently housed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, New York, United States.
The artwork depicts a stylized bull, characterized by Picasso’s distinctive Cubist approach which fractures and reassembles the subject in an abstracted form. The composition breaks the animal’s form into a series of planes and geometric shapes, imparting a sense of both solidity and dynamism. The lithograph showcases the artist’s skill in using line and contrast to suggest form and depth, with the bull’s muscularity and energy distilled into a series of intersecting lines and shaded areas. Each section of the bull’s body is emphasized with varying intensity of line work, which creates a sense of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. The artwork encapsulates Picasso’s exploration of form and his continuous quest to reinterpret reality through the lens of Cubism.
