Cow (F. & S. II.11)

A dealer asks for something pastoral

The idea came from Ivan Karp, the Pop art dealer who worked with Warhol in the 1960s. As Warhol told it, Karp suggested: 'Why don't you paint some cows, they're so wonderfully pastoral and such a durable image in the history of the arts.' Cows had a long pedigree in landscape painting, and Karp seems to have had that tradition in mind.

Warhol answered with something nobody would call a landscape. He took a single head of a Jersey cow, blew it up, colored it fluorescent pink with a magenta outline, set it against a neon yellow ground, and had it printed as rolls of wallpaper. When Karp saw the result he was shocked, then delighted: 'They're super-pastoral! They're ridiculous! They're blazingly bright and vulgar!'

Sources disagree on where the cow came from. One account says Warhol's assistant Gerard Malanga found the photograph in an agricultural publication; another credits the photographs to Malanga himself; a third traces the image to E.S. Harrison's 1940 book Judging Dairy Cattle.

The wallpaper show of 1966

Warhol unveiled the cows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in April 1966. The show had two rooms. One was papered floor to ceiling with the pink-and-yellow cow, the same image repeated over and over. The other held his Clouds: silver, helium-filled pillows that drifted around the room.

The pairing was a provocation. Warhol had publicly claimed to be retiring from painting, and here was a show with no paintings in it at all, only wallpaper and balloons. In practice he kept silkscreening at a furious pace, and 1966 is often cited as the year he committed himself fully to the screenprint.

Critics read the wallpaper in different ways. David Antin, writing in 1966, saw the repeated fluorescent heads as both recognizable and banal, a test of how an image works as a proposition about reality. The historian Barbara Rose took it as a jab at the art world itself: pictures treated like decoration, and a gallery made to look like a boutique.

What F. & S. II.11 is, and how to tell

In the standard catalogue of Warhol's prints by Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann, the original 1966 pink-on-yellow cow is number II.11. It is a screenprint on commercial wallpaper stock, a sheet of roughly 45 1/2 by 29 3/4 inches, printed by Bill Miller's Wallpaper Studio in New York. Because the image was made as wallpaper, the edition was effectively unlimited; one auction catalogue describes it as an edition of unknown size, printed 1966-71.

A small group, about 100 impressions, was signed with a rubber stamp and numbered on the reverse, and some are dated on the front. Those signed sheets are the version this entry tracks, and they trade at a premium to unsigned wallpaper cut from the rolls.

Warhol returned to the cow several times. The series of Cow prints runs from 1966 to 1976 in four editions, including a 1971 version with a deep blue ground replacing the yellow and a 1976 Pink Cow on Purple Background, printed in about 100 signed copies for an exhibition at the Modern Art Pavilion in Seattle. Those later colorways carry their own catalogue numbers; II.11 is the yellow original.

From gallery walls to the auction room

The cow did not stay at Castelli. When the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted Warhol's retrospective in 1971, he asked that the pink-and-yellow cow wallpaper cover the walls as the backdrop for the whole show, so the paintings hung on top of it.

Examples now belong to museums including The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and to university collections such as the Ewing Gallery, whose sheet came as a gift from a New York dealer. One signed example offered by a Warhol print specialist came from the collection of OK Harris, a major New York Warhol dealer.

On the secondary market, the signed II.11 has sold at auction about ten times since 2000, according to one print-market tracker. Recent London results were reported in pounds only: a hammer of £8,758 in February 2024 and a sale in June 2025 reported at £14,000 with fees. An unsigned sheet from the 1966-71 printing was offered online in New York in 2019 with an estimate of $4,000 to $6,000.

Why the cow endures

Warhol's cow took the lowest subject in the old academic hierarchy, farm livestock, and made it the most insistent thing in the room. By printing it as wallpaper he blurred the line between fine art and home decoration, a joke that has only grown sharper as the sheets themselves became collectibles.

The image also shows how Warhol worked. The cow needed no context to be understood, came from a found photograph, was picked out with help from his studio, and was produced by a commercial printer. It sits beside his other animals, from the Cats Named Sam to the 1983 Endangered Species portfolio, but it remains the one most people recognize.

The numbers

Medium

Screenprint in colors on wallpaper

Sheet

45 1/2 x 29 3/4 in (115.6 x 75.6 cm)

Edition

Unlimited wallpaper run; about 100 rubber-stamp signed and numbered on verso

Catalogue raisonné

Feldman & Schellmann II.11

Public collection

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Timeline

1. 1940

   E.S. Harrison publishes Judging Dairy Cattle, one proposed source for the cow image.

2. 1966

   Ivan Karp suggests cows to Warhol as a pastoral subject.

3. Apr 1966

   Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, shows one room papered with the pink-and-yellow cow and a second room of floating silver Clouds.

4. 1966

   Bill Miller's Wallpaper Studio prints the cow on wallpaper stock; about 100 sheets are rubber-stamp signed and numbered.

5. 1971

   Warhol has the cow wallpaper cover the walls of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

6. 1971

   A variant prints the cow on a deep blue ground.

7. Nov 1976

   Pink Cow on Purple Background is printed for an exhibition at the Modern Art Pavilion, Seattle.

8. 2019

   An unsigned 1966-71 sheet is offered online at auction in New York, estimated at $4,000 to $6,000.

9. Feb 2024

   A signed II.11 sells at auction in London for a hammer of £8,758.

10. Jun 5, 2025

    A signed II.11 sells at auction in London for £14,000 with fees.

The world in 1966

• Mar 16, 1966

  Gemini 8 docks with an Agena target vehicle, the first docking in orbit.

• Jun 13, 1966

  The Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that police must tell suspects their rights.

• Jun 30, 1966

  The National Organization for Women is founded in Washington, D.C.

• Aug 29, 1966

  The Beatles play their final concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

• Sep 8, 1966

  Star Trek premieres on NBC.

• Dec 15, 1966

  Walt Disney dies during production of The Jungle Book.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Cow (F. & S. II.11) is number 74 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (72 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Ivan Karp's first reaction to the finished cow was that it was 'blazingly bright and vulgar,' and he meant it as praise.
• At the 1966 show, the room next to the cows was filled with floating silver helium pillows.
• For his 1971 Whitney retrospective, Warhol hung his paintings over walls papered with the cow.
• The cow is a Jersey, a dairy breed, and one theory traces the picture to a 1940 guide to judging dairy cattle.
• Because it was printed as wallpaper, the 1966 cow has no fixed edition size; only about 100 sheets were stamped and numbered.