These boots are made for walking

The artists and philoso­phers of Hellenistic Greece were perhaps the first to feature shoes in their work. Sculp­tors immor­tal­ized the divine activ­i­ties of the pantheon in marble, and one recur­ring theme was the encounter of Aphrodite, Pan, and Eros. This partic­ular sculp­ture was unearthed in 1904 on the Greek island of Delos. The Goddess of love Aphrodite is accosted by Pan, the cloven-hoof God of nature and fertility. Aphrodite’s son Eros, the winged god of romantic love, tugs on Pan’s horn to assist his mother. Pan tries to over­power her, but she has the ulti­mate weapon – a leather sandal – which allows her success­fully to thwart his attack. Helen of Troy may have launched a thou­sand ships, but Aphrodite launched a thou­sand shoes.

The enig­matic “Arnolfini Portrait” by Jan van Eyck is a master­piece of the Northern Renais­sance. It depicts the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and a woman – presum­ably his wife ­– standing hand in hand in a bedroom. The inter­pre­ta­tion of the complete compo­si­tion is still hotly debated to this day. From the single candle in the chan­de­lier to the fluffy dog, each element is highly symbolic. The two pairs of shoes are of partic­ular interest: Arnolfini’s pattens in the fore­ground – wooden over­shoes worn when walking on muddy streets – and his wife’s ornate, red slip­pers in the back­ground. Art histo­rian Erwin Panofsky theo­rized that the shoes repre­sent the couple’s fidelity. In combi­na­tion with the unusu­ally inti­mate setting, he posited that the couple respects the sanc­tity of the marital bed as they prepare to consum­mate their union.

Jean-Honoré Frag­o­nard’s “The Happy Acci­dents of the Swing” captures the quin­tes­sence of the Rococo era. It is friv­o­lous with unashamed impro­priety on full display. The work is also tech­ni­cally impres­sive in its level of detail and use of light and shadow. It was commis­sioned by a French nobleman who wanted to be painted looking up his young lover’s skirt while she is being pushed on a swing. The artist who was orig­i­nally commis­sioned did not want to paint such a scan­dalous scene, so he passed it on to Frag­o­nard, who would become known for painting erotic subjects. The flight of the minus­cule shoe sailing through the air leaves the lady’s dainty, arched foot in a state of undress. In the language of Rococo imagery, a lost shoe symbol­izes losing one virginity. The swing is not only a symbol of wealth, but also a metaphor for the freedom and release one enjoys by adopting a liber­tine approach to sexu­ality. It is no acci­dent that the opening of the shoe is facing down­ward. According to Enlight­en­ment-Era scholar Michel Delon, it func­tions as a cheeky sugges­tion of the view that the depicted commis­sioner is clearly enjoying.

In addi­tion to posed studies of laborers, Vincent van Gogh painted a series featuring their shoes. Though the owner’s visages are absent in “Three Pairs of Shoes”, the distinct char­acter of the shoes gives the painting a kind of portrait quality. The visible brush­strokes empha­size the condi­tion of the leather, formed and soft­ened through sweat and the elements. The wear pattern and the exposed nail heads on the sole of the upturned shoe reveal that the owner bears more weight on the outside of their foot. Van Gogh actu­ally painted the shoes over another painting of a vase of flowers. In the final compo­si­tion, he gives a nod to clas­sical still lives by using a cloth back­drop while giving it a modernist twist by pushing the bound­aries of image-worthy subjects.

Salvador Dalí created many artworks dedi­cated to his wife and muse Gala Dalí, including this object featuring one of her shoes. Orig­i­nally titled “Shoe and a Glass of Milk”, it is regarded as his first surre­alist object. Fully embracing Sigmund Freud’s then-new theory of fetishism, Dalí described its symbolic func­tion in 1931: “A woman’s shoe, inside of which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the centre of a soft paste in the colour of excre­ment. The mech­a­nism consists of the dipping in the milk of a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar, and conse­quently of the image of the shoe, may be observed. Several acces­sories (pubic hairs glued to a sugar lump, an erotic little photo­graph) complete the object, which is accom­pa­nied by a box of spare sugar lumps and a special spoon used for stir­ring lead pellets inside the shoe.”

Artist Carol Rama was a self-proclaimed shoe fan stating: “The foot is a kind of eros, a fetish, it always offers a possi­bility of rapport, of love. The foot and the shoe have a signif­i­cance of beauty” (1984). She was inspired by shoe designer Salva­tore Ferragamo’s work and illus­trated one of his designs several times on Pantone posters. By intensely studying anatomy and how the plantar arch bears the weight of the body, Ferragamo centered women’s bodies in his design prac­tice. Wartime rationing led to some of his greatest inno­va­tions, such as using then-uncon­ven­tional mate­rials like canvas and cork. His 1947 “Invis­i­bile” sandal, featuring his signa­ture “F” heel, was inspired by fish­erman in that he wove a single length of nylon thread through the sole of the shoe. The effect is both a naked and bound foot presented on a golden pedestal, which gives the shoe a certain fetishistic quality. In Carol Rama`s “Senza titolo” from 1972, the artist gave it her own playful twist on the “Invis­i­bile” sandal by replacing the straps with penises – an ironic depic­tion of shoes, which also appears in her early work.

Andy Warhol began his artistic career as an illus­trator who special­ized in drawing ladies’ shoes. In 1955, he was commis­sioned by the failing shoe company I. Miller to create their adver­tise­ments. His eye-catching illus­tra­tions success­fully reestab­lished and rebranded the company as the fore­front of fashion. He would use shoes as subjects throughout his career in collages, photog­raphy, and of course screen printing. In 1980, he made the “Diamond Dust Shoes” series, which featured mono­chro­matic and multi­col­ored pumps arranged in various constel­la­tions. His tech­nique of applying pulver­ized glass and stones to the canvas gives each piece a dazzling, glam­ourous effect. He exper­i­mented with using actual pulver­ized diamonds, but the finish proved to be too dull. Never­the­less, the name remained.

In her thirty-minute-long perfor­mance “Road­works”, multi­media artist Mona Hatoum walked bare­foot on the side­walks of Brixton in London in 1985 with black Doc Marten boots shackled to her ankles. Pre-gentri­fi­ca­tion Brixton was a diverse, working-class neigh­bor­hood. At this time, the police targeted Black and Caribbean resi­dents by dispro­por­tion­ately subjecting them to impromptu searches. The situ­a­tion reached a boiling point in 1981 during the Brixton Riots, in which hundreds of people were injured, and much prop­erty was destroyed. Hatoum’s perfor­mance was in direct response to these events. Her bare feet allude to the vulner­a­bility and lack of protec­tion for the victims of police brutality and insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism. The Doc Martens stand in for the police force – just one step behind, following every move.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Marina Abramović began to work on a series of objects centered around semi­precious stones and their meta­phys­ical prop­er­ties. She invited the public to interact with these “tran­si­tory objects” and actively engage in her method­ology for the first time. Her “Shoes For Depar­ture” are carved from solid pieces of Brazilian amethyst. The immov­able, 70-kilo­gram shoes act as a tele­por­ta­tion device. The audi­ence was instructed to: “Enter the shoes with bare feet. Eyes closed. Motion­less. Depart.” In addi­tion to the shoes, she also created a chair and mirror which are oper­ated with similar prin­ci­ples.

Sixty pairs of old-fash­ioned bronze shoes line the bank of the Danube in Budapest across from the parlia­ment building. Conceived by film­maker Can Togay and created by sculptor Gyula Pauer, “Shoe on the Danube Bank” is a monu­ment to the thou­sands of victims of the far-right, ultra­na­tion­alist Arrow Cross Party, who were in power at the end of World War II from 1944-1945. The militia targeted Jewish and Romani people as well as other ethnic minori­ties and all who opposed their power. Before being executed, the victims were instructed to remove their shoes, which were a coveted wartime commodity and valued more greatly than their lives. The victims were executed by firing squad, and their bodies were pushed into the river. The empty shoes are a sobering reminder of the brutality and disre­gard for human life in the Holo­caust.

Ndidi Dike is one of the most influ­en­tial female instal­la­tion artists of Nigeria. Throughout her over 40-year-long career as an artist and cultural activist, she has used her art to address the most pressing polit­ical issues facing Nigerian society. Her haunting instal­la­tion “How Much Am I Worth?” is dedi­cated to the 276 girls who were abducted from the Chibok Secondary School by the terrorist group Boko Haram in 2014. A metal bunk bed made with a lattice of bullet casings is surrounded by a halo of flip-flops, which bear silent witness to the unspeak­able things that tran­spire upon the beds. Dike uses the discarded flip-flops to bring atten­tion to child marriage and how women and chil­dren are gener­ally disre­garded in the patri­ar­chal society of Nigeria. In this piece, the viewer is confronted with the discom­forting coun­ter­part of collec­tive memory: collec­tive amnesia. As of 2024, Amnesty Inter­na­tional reports that 82 girls from the Chibok attack are still missing and approx­i­mately 1,400 more chil­dren have been kidnapped in subse­quent terrorist attacks.

Concep­tual artist and fashion designer Jo Cope focuses her artistic prac­tice on the history of shoes and their symbolic capa­bil­i­ties. For her, shoes are a means of commu­ni­ca­tion and instru­ments with which to study the human condi­tion. In 2021, she was invited to create a site-specific perfor­mance for the 2021 Venice Design Bien­nale. Venice has been synony­mous with nobility and luxury for centuries; however, these excesses were only made possible by the workers who have popu­lated the city since the first wooden piles were driven into the lagoon. Wanting to high­light these unsung Venetian protag­o­nists, Cope devel­oped the perfor­mance “Walking on Water” about the creation of the Friu­lane – soft-soled, velvet slip­pers that were tradi­tion­ally produced by craftswomen. She collab­o­rated with shoe­makers at the Piedàterre company, the oldest Friu­lane manu­fac­turer in the city. The perfor­mance traces the history of the slipper and how it became a symbol of Venice through the labor of working-class women.