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Lot Essay
Richly gilded in gold leaf and adorned with stars and putti in relief, Andy Warhol’s Large Gold Shoe invokes his fascination with both beauty and the iconic. Fusing the ornate quality of Renaissance art and iconography with 1950s high fashion design, this work embodies Warhol’s early infatuation with style, bound neither by period or place but the allure of luxury.
Known as “the Leonardo da Vinci of the shoe trade” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 42), Warhol cultivated his initial success when working as a commercial illustrator for the shoe designers I. Miller and Sons. Enamoured by the fashion world and its icons, he conceived a series of gold shoes tailored to celebrities such as Julie Andrews, Elvis Presley, and Zsa Zsa Gabor for his 1956 exhibition at Bodley Gallery titled “Andy Warhol: The Golden Slipper Show or Shoes Shoe in America,” an event which gained a double page spread in Life magazine.
Depicting a singular shoe rather than a pair, Warhol heightens the bespoke nature of the Large Gold Shoe at once individualizing its personal character and design, and distinguishing it from both fashion advertisements and commodity alike. Large Gold Shoe thus occupies a space between illustration and object, with the tactile quality of the gold leaf and the putti in relief emphasising its physical presence, which maintains the fantasy inspired by fashion and Warhol’s whimsical draughtsmanship simultaneously in suspense.
The shoe as portrayed in Large Gold Shoe remains a significant and personal motif throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, one to which he returns and reinterprets in works such as Diamond Dust Shoes, 1981, for, as Warhol muses “I’m doing shoes because I’m going back to my roots. In fact, I think maybe I should do nothing but (laughs) shoes from now on” (A. Warhol, quoted in P. Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 306).
Known as “the Leonardo da Vinci of the shoe trade” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 42), Warhol cultivated his initial success when working as a commercial illustrator for the shoe designers I. Miller and Sons. Enamoured by the fashion world and its icons, he conceived a series of gold shoes tailored to celebrities such as Julie Andrews, Elvis Presley, and Zsa Zsa Gabor for his 1956 exhibition at Bodley Gallery titled “Andy Warhol: The Golden Slipper Show or Shoes Shoe in America,” an event which gained a double page spread in Life magazine.
Depicting a singular shoe rather than a pair, Warhol heightens the bespoke nature of the Large Gold Shoe at once individualizing its personal character and design, and distinguishing it from both fashion advertisements and commodity alike. Large Gold Shoe thus occupies a space between illustration and object, with the tactile quality of the gold leaf and the putti in relief emphasising its physical presence, which maintains the fantasy inspired by fashion and Warhol’s whimsical draughtsmanship simultaneously in suspense.
The shoe as portrayed in Large Gold Shoe remains a significant and personal motif throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, one to which he returns and reinterprets in works such as Diamond Dust Shoes, 1981, for, as Warhol muses “I’m doing shoes because I’m going back to my roots. In fact, I think maybe I should do nothing but (laughs) shoes from now on” (A. Warhol, quoted in P. Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 306).