The History of Lines: Nijinsky's Secret Shoes (The Most Magnificent Shoe Illustration in the History of Shoe Illustration.)

JF Ptak Science Books

There are two possible origins of this beautiful and quixotic image.

1)  It is simply an unusual and perhaps hypnotic (?) sales illustration for a maker (improbably named Manfield & Sons) of sports shoes--in this case, for golf. There is no explanation for its exalted and mysterious overuse of lines or its art brut approach. 

2) It is the sympathetic artwork of shoe adoration by the great dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950), used by his wife and sold to manufacturers to help pay for his decades-long "hospitalization" for schizophrenia. Nijinsky was perhaps the greatest dancer of the first half of the 20th century, a shocking talent who danced for only a dozen years or so before the rest of his not-so-dormant mind caught up to him around 1919.  At that point he was in and out of facilities to care for his metal disease until his death in 1946. 

(Sigmund Freud was presented with the opportunity to help the mega-star; he declined, because he didn't "do" schizophrenics.  Freud I think only "did " people whose illness, treatment and eventual curing could fit snugly within the confines of his own stretchy/made-up vocabulary and diagnostic language.)

Nijinsky would dance only one time after the beginning of his series of internments that began in 1919--he wound up living in Hungary during WWII, and when the country was "liberated"* by the Soviet Army in 1945, he and the troops did folk dances in the street for celebration. 
And that was it, so far as any knows.

Truth be told:  the answer of course in #1, though it is difficult to imagine a guy preening his way through this 1920 edition of the Illustrated London New, coming upon this ad, and being overcome by the staggering beauty of the image, deciding in his head (and perhaps even out loud), "I need those shoes".  

The stuff I wrote about Nijinsky is all true, unfortunately--all except the shoe illustration part.

Mark Twain once said that golf "was a good walk spoiled"--and that was without the benefit of having seen these shoes.

*"Liberated" is the word I see used in regard to the Soviets removing the Nazis from Hungary.  The German dictatorship was simply replaced by a Soviet dictatorship.  The Soviets stayed longer.