A complete portfolio of hand-coloured lithographs of shoe designs by Andy Warhol – À la recherche du shoe perdu – together with Shoe and Leg, produced c1955 comes up at Sotheby’s in London on March 22. Warhol was a commercial illustrator for fashion magazines and advertising agencies, and in 1955 he was appointed the sole illustrator of the I. Miller shoe campaign. Warhol made new drawings of shoes each week for advertisements in The New York Times and À la recherche du shoe perdu links directly to his work for I. Miller. Shoes became Warhol’s signature product. In the early 1960s, he moved to the more commercial Pop imagery with which he is now associated.
The hand-colouring was done by Warhol and his friends – with Dr. Martin’s aniline watercolour dyes – often during ‘colouring parties’. As such, each print is unique. It has been estimated that approximately 100 of each illustration were produced. The captions were written by American poet, Ralph Pomeroy, and transcribed in distinctive calligraphy by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola. The text often directly references popular culture, whether Alfred Hitchcock (‘Dial M for Shoe’), Gertrude Stein (‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Shoe’) or Marcel Proust – the title of the portfolio is a riff on Proust’s famous novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past). The portfolio of 18 prints is estimated at £100,000-150,000. They come up at Sotheby’s sale of Prints and Multiples.
UPDATE: The Warhol portfolio made £293,000 in a sale which realised £3.2 million.
ANDY WARHOL
1928 – 1987
A LA RECHERCHE DU SHOE PERDU; AND SHOE AND LEG
ANDY WARHOL
1928 – 1987