Obsessed with shoes? Well, you’re in good company, Andy Warhol was, too. In fact, the roots of Warhol’s undiminishing fame are traceable to his move to Manhattan—“When I was 18, a friend stuffed me into a Kroher’s shopping bag and took me to New York,” he joked—and the whimsical, small-scale, blotted line drawings he did of shoes for the I. Miller company, as well as for publications like The New York Times, Glamour, and Vogue. In 1955, borrowing from Proust, Warhol published a book of his shoe drawings, À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, a copy of which is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection and pages of which are now up for auction in the Andy Warhol @ Christie’s: Pop Meets Chic online sale, which has inspired these in-store selects.
Though shoes styles are always changing, these drawings have never lost their appeal. This has to do with more than color and technique, however charming. As curator Donna De Salvo told CBS in 2007, Warhol “made the shoes larger than life and gave them a personality,” much like he’d do in his Pop phase with silk-screened likenesses of the rich and famous who flocked to the Factory in hopes of securing more than their 15 minutes of fame.
Shop Andy Warhol @ Christie’s: Pop Meets Chic online sale November 3–17. Bids start at $1,000.
