Andy Mouse Portfolio

Without Warhol, Haring always insisted, the Pop Shop would not have come to fruition. The pair first met following Haring’s first New York show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982 and quickly became close friends. They spoke at least weekly from 1983 until Warhol's death in 1987, sharing regular phone calls, studio visits and an appetite for mass media, celebrity and spectacle. The relationship was mutual; Warhol found in the younger artist the same energy that had first drawn him to the Factory two decades earlier, while Haring gained an introduction to Manhattan's creative elite as well as a working education in how to survive fame. Warhol, for his part, was a mentor to Haring, urging him on and encouraging him to open the Pop Shop in 1986, against the advice of Haring’s own dealers, who feared that the venture would dilute his reputation. He recalled, ‘Andy practically convinced me to open the Pop Shop when I started to get cold feet.’

Both artists had coincidentally arrived at the same childhood hero via different avenues. Taught by his father, an amateur cartoonist, Haring had filled his notebooks with drawings of Mickey Mouse growing up, and once admitted that he believed as a child that he was destined to work for Walt Disney. Warhol possessed his own lifelong fascination with Mickey Mouse. While documenting the creation of his Myths portfolio in 1981, he wrote: ‘The Walt Disney film crew came and shot me in front of my Shoes and my Walt Disney drawings. They asked me who my favourite Disney character was and I said, “Minnie Mouse, because she can get me close to Mickey”.’ Neither Haring nor Warhol ever met Walt Disney prior to his death in 1966, but his creation of a mass-produced, endlessly reproducible and instantly recognisable character offered both artists a template through which to explore ideas of mass production, the ubiquity of images and the construction of an artistic persona as recognisable as a cartoon.

Mickey Mouse had already become an emblem in fine art through Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting, Look Mickey, which is considered one of the foundational works of the American Pop art movement. Warhol encountered this work at Leo Castelli’s gallery that year while attempting to conceive his own series of works based on comic-strips, and was disheartened to learn that Lichtenstein had beaten him to it. Warhol, however, did later return to the character in his monumental Myths portfolio and in Quadrant Mickey Mouse, both created in 1981.

Across the Andy Mouse portfolio, the dollar sign performs a particular function as perhaps the most totemic symbol of American mass culture and consumerism during the twentieth century. Warhol began painting one-dollar bills as early as 1962, returning to the motif in 1981 with a series of paintings devoted to the dollar sign itself. Freed from any particular denomination, the dollar sign in isolation became a universally recognisable icon that transcended its currency.

Haring described his approach to depicting Warhol in Andy Mouse: ‘It’s like treating him like he was a part of American culture, like Mickey Mouse was… He himself had become a symbol, a sign for something completely, universally, understandable… putting him on a dollar bill was just like making him more like an icon or part of the American Dream.’ Warhol had spent nearly three decades making art about fame and money, and Haring, in placing his face directly alongside the symbol of the dollar sign, paid tribute by making Warhol himself the subject.

Warhol died in February 1987 following complications from gallbladder surgery, the year after Andy Mouse was completed. Upon learning of the news, Haring wrote in his journal, ‘I found out that Andy Warhol has died. Since then it has been hard to think of anything else.’ He went on, ‘I will always acknowledge my debt to him… He was the personification of New York. It is hard to imagine what New York will be like without Andy. How will anybody know where to go or what is “cool”? Selfishly, I feel like I will lose more than most. I lost a friend, a teacher, and the biggest supporter in the real Art World.’

Seen today, Andy Mouse is Keith Haring’s bold statement on the monumental impact of Andy Warhol’s career and the immense debt that twentieth century visual culture owed to him. Haring granted him the one thing that Warhol had always sought above all: the status of a symbol as iconic as those that he chose to depict.