This famous series of bulls drawn by Picasso, represents more than a thousand words, a conceptual and formal path, where the bull becomes set of intersecting lines and eventually a single thin pencil stroke. I really like the fifth stage of this series, where the bull's body is still powerful but appears as a multifaceted crystal on the verge of becoming an abstract element.
Despite having seen Picasso's works in every European and American museum, I discovered this drawings quite late, and now they are my favorite.
Perhaps for him these drawings were just a formal exercise, but they are very powerful for their communicative strenght. I admire this capacity of graphic synthesis, this search for the sign that culminates in the representation of a vital essence. Picasso managed to disembody the bull without killing him and showed us a new aspect: a mighty animal for its mass and strength, but finally light and subtle in its invisible essence.
These drawings are often shown to children to explain Picasso's artistic path, but they are also useful in stimulating abstract thinking, educating a profound and sensitive vision of reality, respecting also what is not immediately understandable, as Abstract Art is.
This process of synthesis, which resolve reality into concept, is also taught in the graphics and visual communication schools as a path to create a logo. The Picasso’s teaching is: you need to learn a lot, up to perfection, then consciously unlearn everything.