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Lot Essay
Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes series brilliantly encapsulates the most important aspects of his life and career. The subject matter recalls his very early job as a commercial illustrator for a New York shoe company. His luminous screen-printing technique established Warhol as one of his generation's most innovative artists, and the sparkle of the liberally sprinkled "diamond dust" is synonymous with Warhol's glitzy lifestyle at the center of the party circuit as one of New York's most recognizable celebrities.
Diamond Dust Shoes carries a note of the self-portrait, like all of Warhol's greatest images. He began mining his back-catalogue of images at this time in his Reversal and Retrospective paintings, which aimed to scrutinize the phenomenon of his own success. It is no surprise that he reclaimed the motif of the shoe in this reflective frame of mind; it embodied his early dreams and his achieved fame. When he arrived in New York, one of his first jobs was for the I. Miller Shoe Company, where he revolutionized their previously sedate image with a vigorous injection of glamor. His drawings were a hit, so successful that they became a "calling card" for the young artist, bolstering his reputation in the city. His drawings lead to an exhibition and even an illustrated book, Á la recherche du shoe perdu.
Diamond Dust Shoes builds on Warhol's earlier innovative screen-printing. In the late 1970s, Warhol's printer Rupert Smith brought Warhol a sparkling powder that he thought the artist might use in his paintings and prints. Attracted to the medium's incandescent quality, but unsatisfied with the powder's dryness, Warhol turned to galvanized glass to create the brilliant sheen created in Diamond Dust Shoes. Combining matte paint with sparkling "diamond dust" enhanced the work's elegance and richness. Warhol consistently used this dusting of ground glass for the first time in this series of shoe paintings, and its success in the artist's eyes ensured that it recurred repeatedly in his works of the 1980s.
Warhol executed this work at the height of his celebrity status. In the 1999 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery dedicated to Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes, Andy's friend, Vincent Freemont, sums up how, in the age's heady zeitgeist, "The merger of women's shoes and diamond dust was a perfect fit ... Andy created the Diamond Dust Shoe paintings just as the disco, lam, 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 60's, once again reflected the times he was living in through his paintings" (V. Fremont, Diamond Dust Shoes, exh. cat., New York, 1999, pp. 8-9).
Diamond Dust Shoes carries a note of the self-portrait, like all of Warhol's greatest images. He began mining his back-catalogue of images at this time in his Reversal and Retrospective paintings, which aimed to scrutinize the phenomenon of his own success. It is no surprise that he reclaimed the motif of the shoe in this reflective frame of mind; it embodied his early dreams and his achieved fame. When he arrived in New York, one of his first jobs was for the I. Miller Shoe Company, where he revolutionized their previously sedate image with a vigorous injection of glamor. His drawings were a hit, so successful that they became a "calling card" for the young artist, bolstering his reputation in the city. His drawings lead to an exhibition and even an illustrated book, Á la recherche du shoe perdu.
Diamond Dust Shoes builds on Warhol's earlier innovative screen-printing. In the late 1970s, Warhol's printer Rupert Smith brought Warhol a sparkling powder that he thought the artist might use in his paintings and prints. Attracted to the medium's incandescent quality, but unsatisfied with the powder's dryness, Warhol turned to galvanized glass to create the brilliant sheen created in Diamond Dust Shoes. Combining matte paint with sparkling "diamond dust" enhanced the work's elegance and richness. Warhol consistently used this dusting of ground glass for the first time in this series of shoe paintings, and its success in the artist's eyes ensured that it recurred repeatedly in his works of the 1980s.
Warhol executed this work at the height of his celebrity status. In the 1999 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery dedicated to Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes, Andy's friend, Vincent Freemont, sums up how, in the age's heady zeitgeist, "The merger of women's shoes and diamond dust was a perfect fit ... Andy created the Diamond Dust Shoe paintings just as the disco, lam, 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 60's, once again reflected the times he was living in through his paintings" (V. Fremont, Diamond Dust Shoes, exh. cat., New York, 1999, pp. 8-9).