Work Boots (Positive)

Like his Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol’s Work Boots (Positive) elevates a quotidian, commodified object, one made for working class people, and introduces it into the realm of fine art. Work Boots (Positive) is from the artist’s ‘black and white’ painting series, which dates from the early/mid-1980s and is based on advertising materials that Warhol had collected over the years. Visually similar to the artist’s proto-pop black and white ad paintings from 1960, such as Water Heater (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Icers’ Shoes (Estate of Andy Warhol), here Warhol enlarges an advertisement, cropping and redacting the image as he renders it on canvas, ultimately depicting an image that is once familiar and obscure. The (positive) in the title of the painting refers to the ‘color positive’ version of the painting, while the (negative) version is a total color inversion, in which the light areas appear dark.

Beginning with the artist’s early work as a commercial fashion illustrator in the 1950s, through his years of pop art stardom and to the end of his career, Warhol has made a tradition of depicting footwear. "He made the shoes larger than life and gave them a personality," Donna De Salvo, former chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has said. "He makes them into portraits without a face and turns them into objects of desire.” Indeed, in considering the ‘Boot’ paintings from this series – Work Boots, Beatle Boots, and Paratrooper Boots—each boot is personified and instilled with personality, and the viewer finds themselves choosing which boot best represents them, just as they did with Warhol’s Soup Cans and colored Marilyn paintings, picking which flavor is their favorite, and thus participating in Warhol’s most ingenious artistic innovation: the communion of capitalism, commercialism and fine art.