Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol ( New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 30.

"The End of Painting". Excerpt.

The last group consists of the Flowers paintings, the Cow Wallpaper, and the
floating Silver Clouds. The Flowers were produced in vast quantities and all
different sizes, from miniature to wall-size (82"x162"), in the Factory. Warhol
had found the original photo in a women's magazine; it had won second prize in
a contest for the best snapshot taken by a housewife.

The Flowers were shown for the first time in November, 1964, in the Leo
Castelli Gallery, New York. These pictures are not pure photographic
reproductions as those preceding them were; the contours of the flowers were
touched up by hand on the screen. These pictures are unique in Warhol's
production by virtue of their meaningless image content -- a dubious honor shared
only by the Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds in all of Warhol's oeuvre. They are
and will remain strictly decorative, "upper wallpaper," ⁶⁹ to use Henry
Geldzahler's words. Anyone who detects dehumanizing tendencies in these
images is misinterpreting them. Their banal, abstract form is a guage against
which to measure Warhol's other work. Color is used strictly decoratively in
these pictures, and the flowers are there to carry it -- it is their sole function. "I
thought the French would probably like flowers because of Renoir and so on," ⁷⁰
Warhol commented on his exhibition at Ileana Sonnabend in May 1965. He went
on to say, "They're the fashion this year. They look like a cheap awning.
They're terrific." ⁷¹

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