Cow Wallpaper

Cow Wallpaper is a screen print by American artist Andy Warhol in 1966. Warhol created a series of four screen prints from 1966 to 1976.^[1]

Cow Wallpaper [Pink on Yellow]
Artist	Andy Warhol
Year	1966
Medium	Screen print on wallpaper
Dimensions	46 by 28 inches (117 cm × 71 cm)
Location	The Andy Warhol Museum, North Shore, Pittsburgh

Background

According to Warhol, the inspiration for the cow image came from art dealer Ivan Karp:

"Why don't you paint some cows, they're so wonderfully pastoral and such a durable image in the history of the arts." (Ivan talked like this.) I don't know how "pastoral" he expected me to make them, but when he saw the huge cow heads — bright pink on a bright yellow background — that I was going to have made into rolls of wallpaper, he was shocked. But after a moment he exploded with: "They're super-pastoral! They're ridiculous! They're blazingly bright and vulgar!" I mean, he loved those cows and for my next show we papered all the walls in the gallery with them.^[2]

The cow image is believed to have come from E.S. Harrison's book, Judging Dairy Cattle.^[3]

Some art critics have suggested Warhol appropriated the idea from Yayoi Kusama's One Thousand Boats Show (1963). In this installation work, Kusama wallpapered the gallery with 999 identical images of a boat sculpture.^[4][5]

Analysis

The historian and critic Barbara Rose interpreted Cow Wallpaper as a commentary on the nature of art collecting and the character of the institutions where art is displayed. In a review of Warhol's 1971 retrospective show at the Whitney, she observed that cows are a common subject of genre paintings that people display in their homes, and that the wallpaper made the Whitney look like "a boutique". She continued: "Of course the museum has been a boutique for a long time, and people have been treating paintings like wallpaper even longer. But Andy spells it out with his usual cruel clarity."^[6]

Exhibitions

Warhol's April 1966 show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York consisted of Cow Wallpaper in one room, and a second room with Warhol's silver helium-filled Clouds.^[7]

At Warhol's request, the pink and yellow Cow Wallpaper was used as the backdrop to cover all the walls for his 1971 retrospective at the Whitney in New York.^[8][9]