User:Sandy267/sandbox/empire

Andy Warhol's Cow wallpaper is one of eight wallpaper designs Warhol created from 1966 to 1983. The Cow wallpaper was printed in four color combinations between 1966 and 1976 in connection with specific exhibitions or installations. The source image for the cow is from an unknown book on animal husbandry, a page of which is in the Andy Warhol Museum archives; the image Warhol used is titled "A Good Jersey Head."

Warhol signed 100 to 150 sheets of each design, but otherwise the wallpaper was printed in unlimited editions. The wallpaper was executed by Bill's Wallpaper Studio in Queens, New York from Warhol's specifications.

According to Warhol, the inspiration for the cow image came from art dealer Ivan Karp:"Another time he said, '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."

The show Warhol refers to is his April, 1966 show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, which consisted only of Cow Wallpaper in one room, and a second room with Warhol's silver helium-filled Clouds.

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."

knkmmm lmm mkmkm mkmkm

Artists in the exhibition, by residence
• California

• Larry Bell

• Tony DeLap

• Peter Forakis

• Judith Gerowitz

• David Gray

• John McCracken

• Forrest Myers

• Peter Phillips

• Tim Scott

• Michael Todd

• Great Britain

• David Annesley

• Michael Bolus

• Anthony Caro

• David Hall

• Phillip King

• Gerald Laing

• William Tucker

• Isaac Witkin

• Derrick Woodham

• Northeast U.S.

• Carl Andre

• Richard Artschwager

• Ronald Bladen

• Walter de Maria

• Tom Doyle

• Dan Flavin

• Paul Frazier

• Daniel Gorski

• Robert Grosvenor

• Douglas Huebler

• Donald Judd

• Ellsworth Kelly

• Lyman Kipp

• Sol LeWitt

• Tina Matkovic Spiro

• Robert Morris

• Peter Pinchbeck

• Salvatore Romano

• Tony Smith

• Robert Smithson

• Anne Truitt

• David von Schlegell

• Richard Van Buren