Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner circa 1996

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant, and the illustration fails to convey fully the sparkling nature of the diamond dust in the original. This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a very faint stretcher bar mark towards the right edge, inherent to the artist's medium. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"I'm doing shoes because I'm going back to my roots"

Andy Warhol, 24 July 1980 in: The Andy Warhol Diaries (ed. Pat Hackett), New York, 1989, p. 306

"Andy created the Diamond Dust Shoe paintings just as the disco, lamé, and stilettos of Studio 54 had captured the imagination of the Manhattan glitterati. Andy, who had been in the vanguard of the New York club scene since the early 60s, once again reflected the times he was living in through his paintings." Vincent Fremont

Confronting the viewer in magnificent scale and broadcasting a dazzling effect of brilliant colour and sparkling 'diamond dust', Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes of 1980 is the most impressive work of this spectacular series ever to be offered for public sale in recent times. For his entire career and life Andy Warhol was obsessed with shoes, and these high-heeled icons stand as epithets for all the transformative promises of glamour and attraction proposed by twentieth-century fashion. From his earliest days as a star fashion illustrator working on Madison Avenue and producing series of award-winning printed advertisements for companies like I. Miller Shoes and for magazines such as Glamour Warhol understood shoes (and high-heels in particular) as agents of metamorphosis by which quotidian routine could be revolutionized into the fantastic glamour and celebrity that he pursued and analysed so dynamically. By the turn of the 1980s Warhol was looking back on his career and the series of Diamond Dust Shoes represent a real threshold in his output. In 1979, he had initiated his 'Reversals' and 'Retrospective' series, which revisited his most famous icons from Soup Cans, Car Crashes, and Electric Chairs to Marilyns, Mona Lisas and Maos. As David Bourdon has explained, "By ransacking his own past to produce the Reversals and Retrospectives, Warhol revealed himself to be one of the shrewdest of the new wave of post-modernists" (David Bourdon, Andy Warhol¸ New York, 1991, p. 380). For Bourdon, the Shoes executed in 1980 stand as the epitome of this revolutionary perspective, and are thus critical to the entire direction of his now highly-celebrated canon of late work: "Warhol's post-modernist attitude is particularly discernible in his paintings and prints of shoes" (Ibid.) The present work Diamond Dust Shoes, is unquestionably one of the most resolved and successful in this large size of the series, and should therefore be considered in the very top tier of paintings produced in the last decade of the artist's life.

When Warhol decided to re-visit this emblematic theme in his oeuvre in 1980, he had just begun to develop a new silkscreen printing technique involving the use of diamond dust. First presented to him by Rupert Smith around 1979, this medium seemed purpose made for Warhol. Sparkling and glittering, the inherent qualities of diamond dust make a direct reference to movie star glamour, high fashion fame and money. Perhaps because Warhol loved the glamour of gems and had his own collection of jewellery, the artist was immediately enchanted by this new material and wanted to incorporate it into his paintings and prints. However, the diamond dust proved too powdery and did not sparkle enough for Warhol's taste, so Smith ordered larger crystals of pulverized glass from an industrial supply company in New Jersey, and with this new form of "diamond dust" Warhol was able to cultivate a technique whereby the dust would adhere to the surface of the canvas in much the same manner as a silkscreened colour, although with a subtly raised surface relief.

This effect allowed Warhol, initially, to work with the obvious sharp contrast of light and darkness in the diamond dust in a powerful series of black-on-black and white-on-white Shadow paintings. Deeply meditative in feel, these were extraordinarily abstract paintings which accentuated the surface and colour of the material. However, when he developed his next series, the Diamond Dust Shoes, Warhol combined abstraction with the figurative and this is the genius of these works. Warhol gathered shoes of all shapes and sizes from everywhere, some even from his own collection, and assembled them in his studio at 860 Broadway. Placed on white paper, he took a series of Polaroids of various groupings and as with most of his works, chose his favourite images from which to make a series of paintings on the theme. This process of the cropped close-up of the shoes photographed in Polaroid by Warhol, prominently including shoes provided by the celebrity fashion designer Halston, who Warhol was so close to at the time, has been explicated by Bourdon: "Instead of isolating a single shoe against a plain ground as he had done in the 1950s, Warhol jumbled several kinds of ladies' shoes I exuberantly disordered compositions that he arranged, photographed and had silkscreened...Selecting only one shoe of each type, he carefully positioned them to show some in profile and some from above, all choreographed to convey a sense of clutter" (Ibid.) One of the most strikingly original intentions of this choreography is that the final edited image dissects the fields of abstraction and figuration, so that the flattened shapes in brilliant colour become discernible through a few visual cues.

The present work is one of the largest sizes he made and exhibits a harmonious horizontal composition with all the tips of the shoes pointing towards the right in a slightly disarrayed but organized fashion. The deep hues and rich black collide on the surface, enhanced by the glistening diamond dust which catches the light and shimmers extravagantly. As with all of his great icons, Warhol has somehow managed to select a very banal and everyday image and elevate its status. Picked randomly from all sorts of locations, these shoes suddenly come alive with an ethereal quality which somehow makes them much more precious than the sum of their parts. For the present work Warhol has adopted the source image of a colour Polaroid depicting just black shoes, shot on a pure white background, so that the final painting appears in itself more of a Reversal, with the formerly sombre high-heels rendered in shocking pinks, greens, purple and red, and the white backdrop transformed to a starry expanse of ever-changing reflective material.

The subject of shoes and the objects themselves always held particular power over Andy Warhol, and this late work, executed when he was fifty-two, attempts to capture on grand scale his belief in the alchemical power of high-heels. Matt Wribican, Archivist at The Andy Warhol Museum, has cited "Warhol's life-long fetish for feet and shoes" (in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, La Casa Encendida, Warhol on Warhol, p.329), and clearly these high-heels stand as trophies of a tremendously glamorous way of life, and even as stand-in celebrities themselves. Diamond Dust Shoes is testament to some of the most important of the themes that lie at the heart of Warhol's output, and its stark silhouettes in breathtaking hue, floating across the limitless depths of reflective powder, strike an unforgettable and mesmerising work of art.