.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'I always wanted to be a tap dancer, just like Betty Ford and Barbara
Walters.' (Andy Warhol cited in Andy Warhol's Exposures, 1979,
unpaged).
Dance Steps is one of only two known drawings to have been made by Warhol in connection with his Dance Diagram paintings of 1962. This drawing relates to the painting Dance Diagram (Fox Trot: 'The Right-Turn Man') .
Warhol's Dance Diagrams are a rare group of works from the early 1960s that reflect the artist's fascination with both popular culture and the concept of self-improvement in modern industrial society obsessed with image. Painted at the same time as the series of Campbell Soup Cans with which he was to make a name for himself, the Dance Diagrams, along with other 1962 portraits of advertisements for body-building and beauty such as Before and After 3, Dr Scholl and Wigs constitute an important thematic area in his work that reflects contemporary ideals of grace and beauty.
Distinct from these other 'beauty' paintings by the fact that they are instructional diagrams for movement the Dance Diagrams reflect the conceptual influence of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns' work on Warhol's art. They are based on images found in two dance books published by the Dance Guild in 1956: Lindy Made Easy (with Charleston) and Fox Trot Made Easy. Warhol copied these diagrams from these two books, but rather than painting them freehand, as was his usual practice during this early stage of his career, he traced the diagrams onto the canvas in the same way as he had done with the Campbells Soup Cans for the Ferus Gallery. Dance Steps is one of only two known works on paper that relate to this series but which do not seem to be preparatory studies but finished works in their own right.
Implicit within all these works is the notion of a do-it-yourself form of self-improvement which lay close to Warhol's own heart. Like, the body-building adverts or even his later painting-by-numbers landscapes, the D.I.Y. diagram reflects the pressure that modern society exerts on the need to be beautiful as well as to conform. Warhol, a timid, gay man, extraordinarily self-conscious of his own self-image, felt this pressure more than most. With their diagrammatic illustrations of the foot movements to a well-known popular dance, his Dance Diagrams are like secret instructions from a sorcerer's manual that seem to promise a transformation and to open a doorway onto a world of grace, beauty and perhaps even romance. Among the most conceptually sophisticated of all Warhol's works they are also, paradoxically like Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 collage Should Love Come First? absurdist almost Picabia-esque mechanical diagrams ordering a robotic conformity.
Walters.' (Andy Warhol cited in Andy Warhol's Exposures, 1979,
unpaged).
Dance Steps is one of only two known drawings to have been made by Warhol in connection with his Dance Diagram paintings of 1962. This drawing relates to the painting Dance Diagram (Fox Trot: 'The Right-Turn Man') .
Warhol's Dance Diagrams are a rare group of works from the early 1960s that reflect the artist's fascination with both popular culture and the concept of self-improvement in modern industrial society obsessed with image. Painted at the same time as the series of Campbell Soup Cans with which he was to make a name for himself, the Dance Diagrams, along with other 1962 portraits of advertisements for body-building and beauty such as Before and After 3, Dr Scholl and Wigs constitute an important thematic area in his work that reflects contemporary ideals of grace and beauty.
Distinct from these other 'beauty' paintings by the fact that they are instructional diagrams for movement the Dance Diagrams reflect the conceptual influence of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns' work on Warhol's art. They are based on images found in two dance books published by the Dance Guild in 1956: Lindy Made Easy (with Charleston) and Fox Trot Made Easy. Warhol copied these diagrams from these two books, but rather than painting them freehand, as was his usual practice during this early stage of his career, he traced the diagrams onto the canvas in the same way as he had done with the Campbells Soup Cans for the Ferus Gallery. Dance Steps is one of only two known works on paper that relate to this series but which do not seem to be preparatory studies but finished works in their own right.
Implicit within all these works is the notion of a do-it-yourself form of self-improvement which lay close to Warhol's own heart. Like, the body-building adverts or even his later painting-by-numbers landscapes, the D.I.Y. diagram reflects the pressure that modern society exerts on the need to be beautiful as well as to conform. Warhol, a timid, gay man, extraordinarily self-conscious of his own self-image, felt this pressure more than most. With their diagrammatic illustrations of the foot movements to a well-known popular dance, his Dance Diagrams are like secret instructions from a sorcerer's manual that seem to promise a transformation and to open a doorway onto a world of grace, beauty and perhaps even romance. Among the most conceptually sophisticated of all Warhol's works they are also, paradoxically like Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 collage Should Love Come First? absurdist almost Picabia-esque mechanical diagrams ordering a robotic conformity.