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Screenprint on chamois paper, outside the edition, irregularly cut, 5 cow motifs overall (possibly a printer’s test print)
Text in Print: ‘Andy Warhol – Trim’
From the Venice La Biennale
Provenance:
-Gray’s Auction
-Collection of Toby Devan Lewis
Published:
-Feldman/Schellmann IIIA.11: Cow CA. 1978.
Background:
The idea for cows, like for so many of Warhol’s subjects, apparently came from a friend as a lark: the gallerist Ivan Karp told Warhol that no one dealt with pastoral scenes anymore because they were considered too old-fashioned. “My favorite subject is cows,” Karp said, to which Warhol reportedly replied, “New Cows! Fresh Cows!”1 Warhol’s collaborator and Factory assistant Gerard Malanga found a cow photo in an agricultural magazine; Jersey cattle, according to the article, possessed a “quality of refinement.” Warhol’s cow is all about leisure and labor: the animal embodies a certain ideal of contentment and is also a product we consume, not unlike the celebrities whose images he also mined from magazines. Warhol gives his cow the same treatment as his other portrait subjects from the 1960s and early ’70s. Just like Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, orChairman Mao, the cow is seen from the neck up, overlaid with similarly jarring colors. Warhol supposedly said that the cows were “all of us.”
