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00 A Trick of the Mind

A veritable icon of the process of artistic metamorphosis, ★Bull’s Head★ is undoubtedly the most famous transformation of a found object in Picasso’s oeuvre. The artist is said to have discovered the bicycle saddle and handlebar—from which the artwork was made—in a dump, on his way to the funeral of his sculptor friend Julio González, who died in 1942.
The simple assemblage of two objects, with no intervention from the artist, led this work to be linked to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, and in particular his first one, ★Bicycle Wheel★, from 1913. Through the magical act of assemblage, the viewer no longer sees the original object—the bicycle—which is obscured by the evocative power of the newly created bull. There ensues a semantic confusion, a trick of the mind.