Cow is a print depicting a close-up image of a cow in blue and brown hues. Warhol's dealer called them ‘Blazingly bright’, is a revelatory example of Warhol’s varied and constantly evolving subject matter.
Whilst at first unusual, Warhol’s Cow draws upon a classical art-historical repertoire of imagery, with the animal having featured in paintings from the Renaissance period and in academic painting. In this instance, Warhol grants us a distinctly contemporary reproduction from a photograph in a beautiful, psychedelic colour palette that is synonymous with the aesthetic of the sixties and seventies. With the same fervour that he screenprinted the glamourous icons of the silver screen in the same period – such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Warhol also afforded the farm-yard animal the same scale in portraiture – exuding a playful and whimsical nature, the artist challenges the viewers expectation of the artist known for celebrity worship.