Cow wallpaper

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Cow wallpaper
Andy Warhol , 1966
Screen printing on wallpaper
115.5 × 75.5 cm
Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Cow Wallpaper is a screen print series and at the same time a room installation by Pop Art artist Andy Warhol from 1966.

description

In the original version of the on shows strips of wallpaper as the " rapport arranged" in a much smaller screen printing repetition always the same portrait of a cow three-quarters profile in pink red luminous color to signal a yellow background. The portrait is cut off at the top or bottom edge at the end of the strip, which indicates the serial design and the purpose and enables the next strip to be added. The individual images each measure 115.5 × 75.5 cm. The raster points of the pictures indicate that it is an enlargement of a newspaper photo. In fact, Warhol had taken the illustration from a magazine about agriculture.

In the period that followed, Warhol printed numerous color variants and reversals of the motif.

background

Although Warhol had announced to Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in May 1965 that he would now retire from painting, an exhibition was to take place in Leo Castelli 's gallery in New York in April 1966 . While Warhol preferred to put all of his energy into his film projects and the multimedia spectacle Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the beginning of 1966 , as well as promoting his new discovery, the band The Velvet Underground and the singer Nico , he said he ran out of ideas for a new sales exhibition . Downtown he entertained the young audience with relatively elaborate, psychedelic light shows, while he was supposed to sell uptown art for the more upscale clientele. So he asked Castelli's assistant Ivan Karp what he could show. He complained to Karp that he really had no more ideas and that he didn't want to repeat himself over and over again. So the exhibition was conceived in the spirit of the artist saying goodbye to art. Karp advised him to "paint something rural, something like cows." And so Warhol papered the rooms of the Castelli gallery with his cow wallpaper. The cow heads reminded contemporary witness Victor Bockris of "the good-natured Elsie, the trademark of Bordon ice cream."

Also for the exhibition designed Warhol called Silver Clouds , silver helium-filled balloons made of polyethylene in the form of pillow of the size 99 x 150 x 38 cm, the floated through the spaces during the exhibition. Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds were shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery from April 2nd to April 27th, 1966.

Considerations

The Warhol biographer Stefana Sabin : "If the cow wallpaper should show how practical pop art was, the silver clouds were metaphors for art as a consumer item: Warhol wanted them to be understood as throwaway art, because you could let them fly out of the window."

The art historian Charles Stuckey: "These installations illustrated Warhol's open disdain for conventional contexts of art."

Calvin Tomkins , art critic for the New Yorker , commented, “Hardly anything was sold at this show, but production at the Factory was in full swing. And then - the timing was downright scary - Warhol declared Pop Art dead and began a new phase. "

Collections, aftermath in everyday culture

Warhol's Cow Wallpaper can be found in numerous museums, for example the stairwell on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is papered with it. For the first major Warhol retrospective in 1968 in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm , the outer facade of the museum was clad with the decorative cow.

Individual images or multi-colored tableaus of the screen printing can be found in the Tate Gallery in London , in the New York Guggenheim Museum , in the New National Gallery in Berlin , in the collection of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne or in the Art Museum Gelsenkirchen .

For everyday culture , Warhol's cow has been reproduced umpteen times as "utility art" and can be found on mouse pads , coffee mugs, disposable lighters or, ironically, as wallpaper .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b David Bourdon: Warhol. DuMont, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-7701-2338-7 , p. 230.
  2. ^ Victor Bockris: Andy Warhol. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, ISBN 3-546-41393-8 , p. 267.
  3. ↑ Stefana Sabin: Andy Warhol. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-499-50485-5 , pp. 79-81.
  4. ^ Victor Bockris: Andy Warhol. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, ISBN 3-546-41393-8 , p. 268.