Lot Essay
Golden Shoe, or Julie Andrews Shoe, is from the original series of works included in the Golden Slipper Show at the Bodley Gallery in 1956. Featured in a two-page layout in Life magazine the following year, these six allegorical "shoe portraits" of Hollywood stars and other celebrities were among his most successful creations of the 1950's:
"Warhol's fascination with beauty and stardom is evident in his work of the fifties... The shoe drawings for I. Miller, which appeared in the society pages of the New York Times, were a theme Warhol expanded for himself to include "celebrity shoes," personifying such stars as Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elvis Presley, Julie Andrews and Kate Smith" (K. McShine, op. cit., p. 14).
"If the series of gold shoes is considered from a sociological viewpoint, the social group they represent - the stars as a symptomatic phenomenon of the post-World War II years and of the movie industry - then the technique of applying gold leaf in the portrait of a star or in the shape of a shoe or boot, in its formal constituent relationship with gold star clothing, should be seen as a significant feature of the social phenomenon of stars... Warhol's portraits of stars, in 1956, reveal that he was one of the very first artists to reflect on this frequently mentioned relationship between myth and star" (Crone, op. cit., p. 68).
Reviewing the Bodley Gallery exhibition in Art News in 1957, Parker Tyler wrote of Warhol's whimsical drawings: "Smothered in gold leaf and decorative commercial cutouts in gold, they have an odd elegance of pure craziness. If one doubted that they were fetishes, his doubt would be dispelled by noticing that an evening slipper is inscribed to Julie Andrews and a boot to James Dean."
The present work in contained in the original wooden frame in which it was exhibited, as selected by the artist himself.
"Warhol's fascination with beauty and stardom is evident in his work of the fifties... The shoe drawings for I. Miller, which appeared in the society pages of the New York Times, were a theme Warhol expanded for himself to include "celebrity shoes," personifying such stars as Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elvis Presley, Julie Andrews and Kate Smith" (K. McShine, op. cit., p. 14).
"If the series of gold shoes is considered from a sociological viewpoint, the social group they represent - the stars as a symptomatic phenomenon of the post-World War II years and of the movie industry - then the technique of applying gold leaf in the portrait of a star or in the shape of a shoe or boot, in its formal constituent relationship with gold star clothing, should be seen as a significant feature of the social phenomenon of stars... Warhol's portraits of stars, in 1956, reveal that he was one of the very first artists to reflect on this frequently mentioned relationship between myth and star" (Crone, op. cit., p. 68).
Reviewing the Bodley Gallery exhibition in Art News in 1957, Parker Tyler wrote of Warhol's whimsical drawings: "Smothered in gold leaf and decorative commercial cutouts in gold, they have an odd elegance of pure craziness. If one doubted that they were fetishes, his doubt would be dispelled by noticing that an evening slipper is inscribed to Julie Andrews and a boot to James Dean."
The present work in contained in the original wooden frame in which it was exhibited, as selected by the artist himself.