“The Walt Disney film crew came and shot me in front of my Shoes and my Walt Disney drawings. They asked me who my favorite Disney character was, and I said 'Minnie Mouse, because she can get me close to Mickey.”

—Andy Warhol

Double Mickey Mouse emerges from Andy Warhol’s fascination with celebrity, fame and repetition. Warhol often cited the king of animation and entrepreneurship Walt Disney as his favorite American artist – he was known to collect original Disney acetates – and one of the earliest to influence his own artistic pursuits. However, by the time Warhol endeavored to create Double Mickey Mouse, the titular character had evolved over nearly sixty years from his debut as a sympathetic underdog in 1928’s Steamboat Willie to a global icon of entertainment and arguably the most recognizable cartoon character in the world; beyond Marilyn, Elvis, Jackie, Mona Lisa or Mao, it was Mickey whose cultural pervasiveness reigned supreme – and still does.

The form of Double Mickey sees Warhol deploy a technique he had implemented across his oeuvre of depicting cultural icons: repetition. Displayed twice in an identical jaunty stance, head in profile with a classic grin, Warhol’s Mickey Mouse is bisected by vivid geometric planes of color in azure blue, sage green, lilac purple and melon orange, as if viewed through a kaleidoscopic effect. This optical sense is reified by Warhol’s inclusion of diamond dust on the surface of Double Mickey Mouse, which imparts a light-refracting quality as well as an air of glamour, celebrity and preciousness to his cartoon subject. Screenprinting in particular also allowed Warhol to experiment with repetition, evidenced in the unique color combinations of each of the 25 Double Mickey Mouse prints published for the edition. The combination of the cartoon form of Mickey Mouse and the repeated imagery further recalls the techniques utilized in the traditional method of frame-by-frame animation, bringing the decontextualized icon of Mickey Mouse back to his roots as an animated character.

 “All my images are the same, but very different at the same time… Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”

—Andy Warhol

Warhol likely took inspiration for the origin of Double Mickey Mouse from a visit he made the same year to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s blockbuster exhibition Disney Animation and Animators, after which he remarked “it was funny to see Walt Disney stuff on the walls.” It was around this time that the artist envisioned creating a series of prints dedicated to Disney characters like Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck. While this particular series never manifested, Mickey Mouse appeared, before Double Mickey Mouse, in Warhol’s 1981 Myths portfolio in which he selected as his subjects fictional characters that were culturally pervasive and symbolic in American postwar culture, from the patriotism of Uncle Sam to the villainy of the Wicked Witch of the West. On the surface, the inclusion of Mickey Mouse certainly represented childhood nostalgia. However, given his rise from humble steamboat operator to ubiquitous entertainment phenomenon, the character also stood to symbolize the American dream and a certain enterprising, innovative spirit with which Warhol certainly resonated, himself transforming from his beginnings as a commercial illustrator to a powerhouse of artistic and cultural influence. 

Double Mickey Mouse, which extends the more cropped image of the character in Myths to a full body portrait, stands as an exceptional example of Warhol’s proclivity for synthesizing popular culture with his own personal mythology, creating a mirror through the iconic subjects of Pop. By revisiting the early inspiration he found in Mickey Mouse in the last decade of his career, Warhol, in a sense, reflects upon his own success achieved by 1981: the cultural persistence and influence of his own images were beginning to echo that of the globally beloved Mickey Mouse, a popularity and presence that has only since grown over time.