Andy Warhol

 

 

Cow, 1966

Screenprint

45.5 x 29.75 in. (115.57 x 73.66 cm)

Contemporary Council Purchase

© 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York

 

 

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1978)

Anecdotes abound regarding Andy Warhol’s apparently quixotic selection of subject matter, and he was known to ask friends to suggest what he might paint next. Yet, when he made a choice, he invariably created an icon. Many of the most memorable images of the 1960s are those he adapted directly from the popular media or supermarket culture. The origin of the cow image lies, however, in the pages of a relatively obscure livestock journal. In Warhol’s hands, a tiny, insignificant illustration is transformed into an aggressive, vividly colored wallpaper design that is at once shocking and delightful in its graphic inventiveness. Known as New York’s top advertising artist before he burst upon the Pop Art scene in 1962 with his seemingly identical, hand-painted portraits of Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol soon began to employ the silkscreen to generate dozens—even hundreds—of his signature images, creating an environment for the acceptance of multiples. Cow—both the 1962 print and the multi-image wallpaper—was featured in the exhibition The Great American Pop Art Store: Multiples of the Sixties, which opened at the University Art Museum in 1997 and traveled to 10 additional museums through 2000, accompanied by a catalogue of the same title that provides the first scholarly history of American multiples. This catalogue is available at Shop UAM.

Reproduction, including downloading of Warhol works is prohibited by copyright lawas and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.