‘I was working on shoes and I got $13 a shoe; so I had to think in terms of $13 for every shoe. If they gave me 20 shoes to do for an ad, it was 20 times $13.’ ANDY WARHOL

The dynamism of Andy Warhol is astutely apparent with the series Diamond Dust Shoes through its cyclical return to the artist’s earliest motif. From the commercial work of the 1950s, Warhol, almost a quarter of a century later, had achieved the fame and notoriety he sought. Merging art and business, iconography and consumerism, good art and good business were part in parcel for Warhol. Iconic and imbued with classic and personal Warholian traits, Diamond Dust is a prime example of Warhol’s Pop brilliance.

Pre-dating the soup cans, flowers and Jackie O’s, the subject of shoes were Warhol’s first foray into commercial art in 1955. Working on Madison Avenue, Warhol was lauded in the advertising world with awards and worked under an enviable list of clients including Glamour, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. Standing out as the triumph of this era in Warhol’s oeuvre are the whimsical watercolour and ink illustrations of shoes for shoemaker, I. Miller. Moreover, Andy’s shoes rendered in gold-leaf, such as Jean Vaughan (Golden Shoe), from the same period, reflect an early fascination with the metallic surface, which is highly resolved in the present lot.

As such, coming full circle in the final decade of his life, Warhol, returns to the subject of the shoe in 1980 with the Diamond Dust Shoes series. The origins of Diamond Dust Shoes emerged as Halston sent a box of shoes to be photographed for an advertisement campaign. The story, recalled by Vanity Fair editor Bob Colacello, is of Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone emptying the box sent by Halston by turning it upside down, shoes cascading out onto the floor at random. Warhol, inspired by the haphazard layering of individual shoes, took several Polaroid’s, from which silkscreen for Diamond Dust Shoes was derived.

Though originally inspired by chance, the final arrangement of shoes was in fact carefully laid, as the preparatory Polaroids show slight variances in the composition for this particular work. Lined up are ladies shoes of various designs with the black background pronouncing the pointed or rounded toes of each unique shoe. With the fetishization of fashion combined with inherent glamour, Diamond Dust Shoes are at once a reminder of Warhol’s early beginnings and represent a new venture with serigraphy.

The use of “diamond dust” was taken from Rupert Smith in 1979, where Warhol first used the material within his silkscreen process resulting in the Shadows series of the same year. First experimenting with real diamond dust, it proved to have a disappointingly chalky appearance on the silkscreened canvas, forcing Warhol to experiment with pulverized glass instead. This proved to be the most effective method to mimic how one imagines something as luxurious as “diamond dust” to be. Thus, the iridescence achieved adds a textural dimension to the surface of the work. Warhol, obsessive in his nature, explained his fascination: “I see everything that way, the surface of things, a kind of mental Braille, I just pass my hands over the surface of things.” (Ibid, p.457) While the sense of touch was significant for artistic creation for Warhol, the visual effect of the shimmering plane glamourizes commodity while remaining true to his favorite themes of celebrity, fame and money.

The present lot is a refreshingly monochrome rendering, thereby heightening the sense of light and dark while maintaining the prismatic shimmer of the diamond dust. When posed the question, “What’s your favorite colour?” by Glenn O’Brien for Interview magazine in 1977, Warhol simply replied, “Black.” (G. O’Brien, A. Warhol, Interview, June 1977. online) Thus, the motif of shoes combined with its monochrome rendering and the use of a new iridescent material, Diamond Dust Shoes epitomizes Warhol’s obsessive nature within theme, motif and ideology. Imbued with sparkling dust, the present lot is further manifested in the glitz and excess of 1980s Manhattan that Warhol was deeply intertwined with. Not one for subtlety, Warhol concedes, “I don’t think less is more. More is better.” (Andy Warhol: Giant Size, Phaidon, London, 2009, p. 364).