Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2002

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: Diamond Dust Shoes, 1999, no. 4, illustrated in colour
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Andy Warhol Series and Singles, 2000, p. 174, no. 94, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The catalogue fails to convey the glittering quality of the surface. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a short and faint diagonal rub mark and a spot just below it where the diamond dust is slightly thinner. Along the left and top edges a very faint and very light stretcher bar mark is slightly noticeable. Close inspection reveals a faint trace of handling marks along the centre of the overturn bottom edge and to the overturn edges towards the bottom right and bottom left corners with an associated pin-sized paint-loss, and very thin hairline cracks to the overturn edges inherent to the artist's working process. 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

Magnificent in scale and broadcasting a dazzling expanse of sparkling 'diamond dust', Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes of 1980-81 is an exceptional work from this spectacular series. As emblems of high-fashion, Warhol was of course lured by the specific appeal and artistic possibilities of these high-heeled icons throughout his career, and here they stand as epithets for potential transformation. From his earliest days as a fashion illustrator working on Madison Avenue, creating award-winning advertisements for companies like I. Miller Shoes and for magazines such as Glamour, Warhol recognised high-heels as agents of metamorphosis by which a quotidian necessity of dress could become a totem of glamour. By the turn of the 1980s Warhol was looking back on his career and the series of Diamond Dust Shoes represent a 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 the Electric Chairs to Marilyn, Mona Lisa and Mao. 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 at the beginning of the new decade 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 among 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. Warhol loved the glamour of gems and had his own collection of jewellery, and he was immediately enchanted by this new material. 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 inspiration of these works. Warhol gathered shoes of all shapes and sizes 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 later 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 in 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 outlines of the flattened shapes invite contemplation on the semiotic associations of visual cognition.

The subject of shoes and the objects themselves always held particular power over Andy Warhol, and this late work, executed when he was in his early fifties, 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 talismanic trophies of an alluring existence, 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, floating across the limitless depths of reflective powder, strike an unforgettable and mesmerising work of art.