I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Shoes, from the book À la recherche du shoe perdu

Warhol created this hand-colored print while working on a shoe advertising campaign for I. Miller & Sons. Ink outline drawings were reproduced and hand-colored by the artist and a team of friends for an illustrated book with poems about shoes by Ralph Pomeroy. The book’s title is a reference to Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), which had important associations for Pomeroy. Warhol’s mother added the calligraphy.

Although Warhol stopped working in advertising in 1963, shoes remained a recurring subject in his work. The artist’s 1980 Diamond Dust Shoe series of screenprints, for instance, featured garishly colored women’s heels cast against a black background. Warhol sprinkled the surface of his images with diamond dust, heightening the images’ sense of wealth and glamor.