Andy Warhol

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1999

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: Diamond Dust Shoes, 1999, p. 35, illustrated in colour

Madrid, La Casa Encendida, Warhol on Warhol, 2007-08, p. 189, illustrated in colour 

Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, on loan to the permanent collection until 2014

Colour: The colour is fairly accurate, although the printed illustration fails to convey the sparkling nature of the diamond dust. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals extremely minor wear to the corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Glittering with a crystalline-lux surface, Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes belongs among the most elegant, chic and monolithic from Warhol’s eponymous series. Its sheer black on black colour palette distinguishes the curves and outlines of individual shoes through shimmering diamond dust alone. Perhaps a concession to minimalist trends at the end of the 1970s, this painting veers towards a kind of monochrome abstraction that is nevertheless resolutely entrenched within Warhol’s definitive Pop canon.

The spectacular series of Diamond Dust Shoes celebrates the return of Andy Warhol to his roots, an engagement harboured by Warhol since the nascent beginnings of his career: the illustrious glamour and fetishist adoration of women’s shoes. In the mid-1950s Warhol started as a commercial illustrator for I Miller Shoe Company. His advertisements appeared in The New York Times and thus acted as the launch pad for Warhol and granted access to a world of creative and celebrity decadence. This formative engagement thus laid the foundation for his reprisal of the same theme thirty years later. In 1980 as in 1955, Warhol continued to recognise women’s high-heeled shoes as an emblem of a consumer-obsessed world driven by desire. However in this mature work, stylish hand-drawn lines and ornamental gold leaf are replaced with and superseded by towering monumental proportions, mechanic imitation, black monochromaticity and flashy diamond sparkle. Hyper and sexed-up to suit the booming 1980s, this work truly draws on the fetishistic traits of desire. Nonetheless, though keeping abreast of the times, this late series is resolutely testament to the prevailing theme apparent across the breadth of Warhol’s practice: the inanimate and mass-produced voyeuristically endowed as high-art protagonists and propelled into the immortal realm; the consumer item as the Twentieth Century’s votive icon.

The origins of Diamond Dust Shoes emerged as Halston, celebrity fashion designer and close friend of Warhol, sent a box of shoes to be photographed for an ad campaign. Warhol was inspired by the “ladies shoes in exuberantly disordered compositions that he arranged”, and gathered shoes of all shapes and sizes, some from his own collection, assembling them in his studio at 860 Broadway (David Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1991, p. 380). Arranging them on plain paper, he took a series of Polaroids, later choosing his favourite compositions for the series of paintings executed between 1980 and 1981. Concurrently, Warhol began to develop a new silk-screening technique involving the use of ‘diamond dust’, a material first presented to him by fellow artist Rupert Smith around 1979. Though enchanted by this new material, true ‘diamond dust’ proved too powdery as a medium; as such, Warhol was forced to seek an alternative. Smith ordered large crystals of pulverised glass from an industrial company in New Jersey; the coarser texture enabled Warhol to achieve the subtly raised sparkling surface he desired, resulting in a painterly effect that shimmers and sparkles, a perfect encapsulation of the glitz and glamour of fashion, society and consumption that embodies the very core of Warhol’s Pop aesthetic.