Why Did Andy Warhol Make Cow Wallpaper?

2) It seems artists have never tired of drawing cows—they’ve been the muse of many crucial experiments with form in the 20th century. Along with trees and windmills, cows were one of the main subjects that the artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesberg played with in their journey from figuration to abstraction in the early 1900s, the contours of the animal gleefully unwinding into line and shape. Pablo Picasso made the virile cow a central focus of many drawings, prints, and sculptures; he even depicted himself as a bull. Still, by the time Warhol introduced his cow, the animal was most associated with bucolic landscape scenes popular in the 19th century, and the cud-chewing pace of county fairs, all suggesting someplace far away from the technological thrum of cutting-edge, metropolitan art.

4) Warhol gives his cow the same treatment as his other portrait subjects from the 1960s and early ’70s. Just like Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, or Chairman Mao, the cow is seen from the neck up, overlaid with similarly jarring colors. Warhol supposedly said that the cows were “all of us.”²

5) In 1952, the critic Harold Rosenberg, writing about Abstract Expressionism in his essay “The American Action Painters,” warned that the worst results of the new, larger scale and allover approach to painting could lead to “apocalyptic wallpaper.” Warhol wittily takes up some of the most critical aspects of the generation of artists who came just before him in New York, making actual wallpaper. Gone is a reverent environment in which to view a work. “I hate to see things on walls,” Warhol told Mademoiselle magazine in 1967. “Doing the whole room is OK, though.”³ A New York Times review of the Cow wallpaper’s debut in April 1966 at Leo Castelli Gallery inadvertently supported Warhol’s claim that he was abandoning painting less than a decade after taking it up; the room “is empty,” the critic observes, “the art consisting of Warhol-designed wallpaper on the walls themselves.”⁴ As art historian Benjamin Buchloh later put it, Warhol’s Castelli exhibition was “the farcical sacking of modernism.”⁵

6) For his first solo museum exhibition, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in the winter of 1968, Warhol and the museum’s director, Pontus Hultén, covered the facade of the museum in his dayglo Cow wallpaper. Describing the barrage of images of electric chairs, detergent boxes, and giant flowers inside, one reviewer asked, “Who doesn’t long for grass, cows, and milk after such an assault on the mind?”⁶

7) Perhaps inspired by the cows in Sweden, a few years later Warhol proposed that his upcoming retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art consist entirely of Cow wallpaper (glued backwards to the wall) or his Flower paintings. The curators demurred.⁷

9) A year after he made his Cow wallpaper, Warhol participated in an artist’s book portfolio of rubber stamp prints, Stamped Indelibly. He again took a “found” image, using a commercially available stamp of a cow, and made 20 impressions of the animal’s head in purple ink in a tilting grid that shows some of the same “unique” mechanical reproduction marks of his screenprints, including different amounts of ink and ink catching on the negative corners of the stamp. This book is in MoMA’s collection.