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拍品專文
With its high-keyed colors and sparkling surface, Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes dazzles as one of the artist’s most evocative compositions. Painted in 1981, it is a charismatic example of one of the artist’s late paintings in which he commemorates the leitmotif of footwear that had such personal and professional significance for him throughout his career. It also marks a return to his roots as the artist began his career a professional illustrator for a shoe company. Shoes remained an important subject for Warhol throughout his career, as he explained in 1980 “I'm doing shoes because I'm going back to my roots. In fact, I think I should do nothing but shoes from now on” (A. Warhol quoted in P. Hackett, (ed.), The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 306).
The surface of the canvas reverberates with a constellation of hot pink, white and electric-blue shoes which float against a sparkling jet-black background. These large-scale shoes dwarf their real world models, removing them from the prosaic and compounding their sense of otherworldliness. Although he plays with an abstract aesthetic in the work, Warhol nonetheless draws attention back to his classic Pop vernacular with his use of the contemporary fashion vernacular, the strong silhouettes and his bright, vibrant palette of neon colors.
With its sensuous surface, Diamond Dust Shoes far surpasses the tantalizing appeal of his source material. His application of the sparkling surface, a technique he began experimenting with in 1979, proved to be perfectly Warholian in that it the allowed his preferred themes of fame and glamor to be manifested materially on the canvas by utilizing the social connotations of diamonds as the most highly coveted objects. Warhol had employed gold paint in a similar manner in seminal works much earlier in his career such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Gold Marilyn Monroe from 1962. By the early 1980s when this work was produced, Warhol had long since cultivated a social circle of beautiful, famous, and fashionable people. It was the height of popularity for the legendary nightclub Studio 54, which Warhol and his friends frequented. The dazzling effect of the shimmering canvas evokes the twinkling light emanating from a disco ball and bouncing off of the shoes of New York City’s elite. Thus the work contains strong autobiographical elements for Warhol both in its allusions to his prolonged history with shoes as a subject of his art and his abiding preoccupation with money, fashion, and fame.
Adding to its intrigue, none of the shoes exist in a pair; they are all individual. A pair of shoes reflects a direct relation to a utilitarian product; one wears shoes to protect their feet. When presented in this way as a group of individual objects, each shoe is isolated in its role as a symbol; an icon. With its relationship to the body of a woman, the shoe, especially a stiletto, is a sex symbol and can even be extended to its representation of a foot fetish. Just as with many of his other object paintings, while the artist is interested in the form and shape of the object that he is painting, the object is always a larger representative of a bigger theme or sentiment. While the shoe differs from Warhol's Coca-Cola bottles, or a Campbell's Soup Can in its anonymity, the power here lies with the international signifier of female sexuality rather than with a commercial product. Of his 1950s shoe designs, curator Richard Martin explains the fascination of the shoe; "What is [a] High-Heeled Shoe... but a platonic shoe compounded of any and all fetishes and icons of foot and shoe configured to a starlet's dainty shoe...[or] Cinderella's fictitious shoe?" (R. Martin, The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 73).
Diamond Dust Shoes presents much of Warhol's signature convention of repetition and, just as a Marylin or a Marlon Brando, the shoes represent the spirit and marketability of a golden era romanticism; its glamour and literal glitz speaks for the moment when it was made, as well as a timeless reminder of universal tropes.
The surface of the canvas reverberates with a constellation of hot pink, white and electric-blue shoes which float against a sparkling jet-black background. These large-scale shoes dwarf their real world models, removing them from the prosaic and compounding their sense of otherworldliness. Although he plays with an abstract aesthetic in the work, Warhol nonetheless draws attention back to his classic Pop vernacular with his use of the contemporary fashion vernacular, the strong silhouettes and his bright, vibrant palette of neon colors.
With its sensuous surface, Diamond Dust Shoes far surpasses the tantalizing appeal of his source material. His application of the sparkling surface, a technique he began experimenting with in 1979, proved to be perfectly Warholian in that it the allowed his preferred themes of fame and glamor to be manifested materially on the canvas by utilizing the social connotations of diamonds as the most highly coveted objects. Warhol had employed gold paint in a similar manner in seminal works much earlier in his career such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Gold Marilyn Monroe from 1962. By the early 1980s when this work was produced, Warhol had long since cultivated a social circle of beautiful, famous, and fashionable people. It was the height of popularity for the legendary nightclub Studio 54, which Warhol and his friends frequented. The dazzling effect of the shimmering canvas evokes the twinkling light emanating from a disco ball and bouncing off of the shoes of New York City’s elite. Thus the work contains strong autobiographical elements for Warhol both in its allusions to his prolonged history with shoes as a subject of his art and his abiding preoccupation with money, fashion, and fame.
Adding to its intrigue, none of the shoes exist in a pair; they are all individual. A pair of shoes reflects a direct relation to a utilitarian product; one wears shoes to protect their feet. When presented in this way as a group of individual objects, each shoe is isolated in its role as a symbol; an icon. With its relationship to the body of a woman, the shoe, especially a stiletto, is a sex symbol and can even be extended to its representation of a foot fetish. Just as with many of his other object paintings, while the artist is interested in the form and shape of the object that he is painting, the object is always a larger representative of a bigger theme or sentiment. While the shoe differs from Warhol's Coca-Cola bottles, or a Campbell's Soup Can in its anonymity, the power here lies with the international signifier of female sexuality rather than with a commercial product. Of his 1950s shoe designs, curator Richard Martin explains the fascination of the shoe; "What is [a] High-Heeled Shoe... but a platonic shoe compounded of any and all fetishes and icons of foot and shoe configured to a starlet's dainty shoe...[or] Cinderella's fictitious shoe?" (R. Martin, The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 73).
Diamond Dust Shoes presents much of Warhol's signature convention of repetition and, just as a Marylin or a Marlon Brando, the shoes represent the spirit and marketability of a golden era romanticism; its glamour and literal glitz speaks for the moment when it was made, as well as a timeless reminder of universal tropes.