Andy Warhol’s Cow series, developed between 1966 and 1976, marked yet another instance of the artist subverting artistic expectations. While cows may seem an unlikely subject for Pop Art, they were far from Warhol’s first unconventional choice. His earlier works—featuring soup cans, passenger tickets, and even electric chairs—had already demonstrated his appetite for challenging the boundaries of contemporary art. Warhol’s Flowers series had further broadened his visual lexicon, proving that even delicate, natural motifs could be reimagined in a Pop context. If flowers could become Pop, then why not cows?

Still, by the early 1970s, Warhol was more readily associated with celebrity, consumerism, and glamour than with the natural world. That made the Cow prints all the more surprising. He created Cow 11, one of five works in the series, during the closing days of his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1971.

The origin of the series can be traced back to an encounter in the early 1960s, when Warhol and close friend Ted Carey visited the Leo Castelli Gallery and met influential art dealer Ivan Karp. After showing them one of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, Karp agreed to visit Warhol’s studio. The two quickly bonded—Warhol later recalled, “I had a very good rapport with Ivan right away… he had an ‘up’ attitude to everything.” It was Karp who would eventually suggest that Warhol paint cows, describing them as “wonderfully pastoral… a durable image in the history of the arts.”

True to form, Warhol accepted the suggestion—but reinterpreted it in his own radical style. “I don’t know how ‘pastoral’ \[Ivan] expected me to make them,” Warhol later joked. “But when he saw the huge cow heads—bright pink on a bright yellow background… he was shocked.” Rather than presenting a peaceful, rural scene, Warhol delivered a loud, high-contrast composition that turned the cow into an icon of Pop absurdity.

The resulting image was not just made for framing—it was made for wallpaper. Warhol, ever focused on repetition and the commodification of imagery, printed the Cow design as wallpaper and used it to line gallery walls. The installation blurred the line between fine art and commercial decor, a theme that had defined much of his earlier work.

Upon seeing the installation, Karp exclaimed, “They’re super-pastoral! They’re ridiculous! They’re blazingly bright and vulgar!” His shock quickly gave way to admiration. The photograph that formed the basis for Cow 11 was taken by Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s longtime assistant, who captured the cow’s head in sharp profile, turned directly toward the viewer. What might have been a mundane rural image was electrified through Warhol’s palette and scale. With its fluorescent pink and yellow hues, Cow 11 commanded attention just as powerfully as Warhol’s Marilyns or his Campbell’s soup cans.

In essence, Cow 11 encapsulates Warhol’s gift for recontextualizing the familiar. He invited viewers to see an ordinary animal with new eyes—rendered not as a pastoral cliché, but as a symbol of Pop spectacle. Just like his Flowers series, the Cows infused natural imagery with mass-market appeal, making them endlessly repeatable and never dull.

The prints were produced in New York by Bill Miller’s Wallpaper Studio, Inc., marking an early instance of Warhol’s foray into installation-based presentation—an approach he would continue to explore in subsequent exhibitions. Ultimately, the Cow series reminds us that for Warhol, no subject was too mundane to be transformed. Once put through the Warhol screenprint machine, even a cow could become an icon.