These Vintage Shoes A Tiffany Lamp Unto Your Feet

by Stephen J. Gertz

Say hello to the Karl Friedrich Schoensiegel Schuhmuseum in der Mappe (The Shoe Museum in Portfolio), an extensive archive of original watercolors, drawings, autograph manuscripts, and scholarly materials related to shoes and their historical and cultural significance by Schoensiegel, the Munich-based, erudite connoisseur of vintage footwear from around the world.

Schoensiegel was the most distinguished collector of such material during the first half of the twentieth century.

The collection is being offered by Librairie Jean-Claude Vrain of Paris.

The collection was last seen at Bonham's on June 22, 2011; the hammer fell at $42,700 including buyer's premium.

 

The archive is comprised of 349 watercolors, here sampled, and is grouped into several geographic and historical sections: Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and Europe; in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth centuries. Each watercolor is vivid, bright and clean.

Schoensiegel visited museums throughout the world and made sketches of each interesting shoe he came across, later developing the sketches into fully-developed watercolor drawings. The Schuhmuseum in der Mappe was exhibited in Berlin in 1939.

The shoes, alas, are not rated for comfort or practicality, though it doesn't take a genius to understand that if you have to walk in what appear to be Viking boats with bows curved upward to Valhalla or tie the toes of your shoes to your knees, a casual passeggiata through the streets of Siena - or anywhere else - will be a challenge without a podiatrist or cobbler following in your wake.

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All images courtesy of Librairie Jean-Claude Vrain, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Vintage Shoe Art Walks The Runway At Bonham's.

Confessions Of A Vintage Shoe Fetishist.
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Beautifully Illustrated Erotic Manuscript Brings 10 x Estimate At Christie's

By Stephen J. Gertz

Das Buch der Venus vulgivaga, (The Book of Venus Vulvigaga) an illustrated erotic manuscript from c. 1910, was the headliner at Christie's Fine Books Sale on March 21, 2012.

Estimated to sell for £800 - £1,200 ($1,269 - $1,903), it fell under the hammer for £15,000 ($23,805, incl. premium), a startling result.

Attributed to Fridericus Styrus and extensively and richly illustrated with 165 gallant and erotic drawings in pen, ink, and watercolor, the quarto manuscript, with tentative place of origin Graz, Austria, is written in black ink in a neat cursive hand on 199 pages, and bound in contemporary quarter red morocco.

The text, with a deft, delicate touch, considers various and diverse erotic themes. Women's shoes and feet are fetishized; the female netherland is discussed with variations illustrated; and a cavalcade of copulation postures populate some of the leaves.

How does an auction item wind up exceeding its estimate by over a factor of ten?

"The estimate was always ‘come and get me’ but still: the market for quality filth seems strong," Sven Becker, Associate Director and Book Specialist at Christie's, told Booktryst.

And fresh, highly attractive, artful material, new to the marketplace, will always find a comfortable home.

The Newberry Library holds a similar, shorter manuscript in its Special Collections, 4th floor, call number VAULT Wing MS 138.

Christie's was kind to provide Booktryst with multiple images from Das Buch der Venus vulgivaga but, while quite artfully executed and quite charming, a few are so charming that I've  left them out of this report. My 85 yr old mother reads Booktryst and I'd like her to make to 86 without dying from charm.

The "Omnipotent Rose," above, with its sturdy stalk, is, amongst the explicit, original illustrations within the manuscript, probably the least objectionable to those of sensitive nature; perhaps a little worse for the "where in the world, Stephen," my mother will likely make it through without incident.
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Images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

The Floating World of Japanese Erotica At Christie's.

The Celebrated Stable of Erotica Writers, Part I.

The Celebrated Stable of Erotica Writers, Part II: The Perp Walk.
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Vintage Shoe Art Walks the Runway at Bonhams

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Munich collector and scholar Karl Friedrich Schoensiegel assembled what was at the time one of the most important collections of shoes in the world. Exhibited in Berlin in 1939, the War prevented further public exhibition of the collection or publication.

 

Bonham's recently  auctioned the Schoensiegel Collection archives at their Fine Books and Manuscripts sale, June 22, 2011. Estimated to sell for between $40,000 - $60,000, the hammer fell at $42,700, including buyer's premium.

 

It's a tremendous archive of original watercolors, drawings, manuscripts, and scholarly materials related to shoes and their historical and their cultural significance.

Schoensiegel's vibrant and skillful watercolor renderings document the collection in part, and  other materials gathered therein preserve an important contribution to fashion scholarship that has yet to be fully realized.

The archive is comprised of: Das Schuhmuseum in der Mappe (The Shoe Museum in a Portfolio), 277 bright and clean original watercolors on paper executed by Schoensiegel, depicting shoes in the artist's own collection and in the collections of museums around the world, housed in six portfolios hand-titled in black and red. The watercolors are grouped into several geographic and historical sections: Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and Europe; Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries.

 

...A collection of sixty-one smaller original watercolors on paper, seven ink drawings, one drawing in pencil, and one shoe sole and ink collage, of shoes, soles, and related subjects, many of an erotic nature. It was inevitable, I suspect, that eroticism would, ultimately, suffuse the collection.

...And 145 original tracings on transparencies of shoes (many from the watercolors in the Schuhmuseum) and related subjects.

 

Also included are several manuscripts and typescripts, published and unpublished, of Schoensiegel's and his collaborator Valentin Dittmeier's historical and interpretative studies of shoes: Der Bau und die Funktion des Fusses {The Construction and Function of the Foot, Ulm-Donau: Fachzeitung der Schuhmachermeister, 1939]; Der Schuhim Wandel durch Sechs Jahrtausende (The Change in  Shoes Through Six Millennia, Ulm-Donau: Fachzeitung der Schuhmachermeister, 1940.]; Von der Bedeutung (Symbolik) des Fusses und des Schuhs (Of the Symbolic Meaning of the Foot and the Shoe); Geschichte der Fussbekleidung (History of Footwear); and Uber die Bedeutung des Fusses und des Schuhes. (On the Importance of the Foot and the Shoe).

Finally, the collection features several folders containing miscellaneous materials for educational use or the preparation of manuscripts including mounted clippings, reproductions of drawings, and other ephemera, with extensive annotations and captions in Schoensiegel's hand, as well as a portfolio of mounted black and white and color photographs and reproductions featuring the legs of women wearing high heels. 

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All images courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.

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Confessions of a Vintage Shoe Fetishist

by Stephen J. Gertz

Keep your Manola Blaniks, Giuseppi Zanottis, your Dolce & Gabbanas. When I need to snuggle up and spoon I go for vintage, old-fashioned ladies' shoes. It's like collecting rare books: Modern Lit. or Antiquarian? I prefer a shoe that's been around the block, is experienced and has character. They don't make 'em like they used to. As far as I'm concerned, they stopped making shoes when Chronos hit the twentieth century.

Tonight, I've taken six of my favorites out of the Holy Closet of Holies, my inner sanctum of footwear du femme, for an evening of pleasure, just me and my little pretties, menage a sept, alone at last.

Check out the lines on this black beauty. You don't need horse-sense to see its appeal: Sleek in fine silk that when light strikes at the right angle seductively shimmers and entices. Irresistible! And the heavenly flare of the heel as it touches the pillow I pose it on...A goddess upon a velvet pedestal, is it not so? I admit that there are times when, after gazing upon it with all the love a man can have for ladies' footwear, I lose control, madly grab it, grope to my heart's content, and sigh with the greatest of satisfaction.

Oh, how often have Miss Frilliest and I spent a quiet evening at home, curled up by the fireplace. a brandy in one hand, her in the other. I love it when a woman's shoe wears a mini-skirt - so above the heel risqué! And, aren't you, as I am, tempted to lift it to spy what delights lie underneath? Don't get me started on the needle-work on the toe. I LOVE tattooed ladies.

Provenance is everything, I believe, and when I raise her to my nose and gently inhale the scent sends me, and I become Proust in remembrance of pumps past, this pump in particular, and thank my lucky star that anti-fungal and anti-bacterial foot-care products once had no place in society's upper strata. I prefer the natural aroma of plantar fascia against leather - aged and fermented to perfection. Like a great wine, a great shoe must have a great nose. Notes of goatskin, chocolate,  peat moss, mango, rich loam, horse manure, cigars, shmütz, toe cheese, and talc - I frolic in the Elysian Fields; I can't help it. It tells you where a shoe has been, and I am often  lost in a reverie while contemplating a  lady's tumescent foot boldly inserting itself into the warm inner shoe over and over again, what that foot must feel, and what Miss Frilliest felt to be so filled to fullness. I get all pumped-up. Sue me.

Not a pump, not a slipper, it's my flat-bottomed land-gondola with heel as rudder, and I often imagine that I'm standing at its stern, oar in hand, as I serenade it and, by extension, all ladies' shoes with "O Solé Mio." Just because I'm a Vice-President of the Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perthshire &c. &c. doesn't mean I don't get lonely. So lonely. Call me Shoeless Joe from Kokomo, a tragic figure in my own psychodrama.

I like womens shoes the way I like my women. Sturdy. Dependable. Silent. A bit stout. I don't trust a pump that isn't a little plump; too lean and it's clearly not enjoying  life to the fullest. I like a shoe that  has meat on its bones and leaves a big footprint - on  my  chest, back, whatever; 'makes  no  difference to me.  Check-out that strap and stiletto toe! I get shivers as I worship. Excuse me while I retire to the throne room to, uh, genuflect.

Ditto the above with this fine lady who dares red. Le plus passionnés! We all know the symbolism of red lipstick. 'Goes double with red heels. "I am woman shoe, hear me roar, in plus-size too big to ignore, and I know too much to go back and pretend. 'Cause I've heard it all before and I've been down there on the floor and no one's gonna keep me down again."

Not if I can help it, mon cher.

Finally, la piece de resistance in whose presence I am powerless to resist, possessing all the qualities I most admire plus a demure, low-key color that purrs, "I'm cool on the outside but a tigress on the inside."

To worship and adore that which comes between a lady and the floor is a religion not easily converted to. We are the few, the proud, and, thus chosen, just trying to be all that we can be. It ain't easy being Shoeish.

Oh, I hear your tittering and muffled chuckles. I suppose I should be embarrassed. I'm not. Some neurologists have suggested that shoe fetishism is caused by the feet and the genitals occupying adjacent areas of the somatosensory cortex, possibly entailing some neural crosstalk between the two. No surprise to me. I've been listening to them chat for as long as I can remember and I can't get enough of it. I love dirty talk.

Now, excuse us, please - time for a little quality-time, enfin seul!

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GREIG of Glencarse, T. Watson, A Vice-President of the Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perthshire &tc. &c. Ladies' Old-Fashioned Shoes. With Eleven Illustrations from Originals in his Collection. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1885. First edition (2d, 1900). Oblong quarto. 9 text pp. Eleven chromolithographed plates.

Colas 1312. Lipperheide 1744. Hiler p. 395
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Images courtesy of Marilyn Braiterman Antiquarian Bookseller, who is currently offering this rare volume.

Photo credit: Fang-Ling Jong.
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