"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
Mickey Mouse emerges from Andy Warhol’s fascination with celebrity, fame, and consumption. This screenprint comes from Warhol’s 1981 Myths portfolio, in which the artist created portraits of ten fictional subjects well-known in American Post-War culture. Pulling inspiration from television, the silver screen, and American iconography, other recognizable faces in this series include Santa Claus, Dracula, and Super Man. When planning several of the prints from Myths, Warhol invited friends and actors to his studio to dress up in costume and pose in front of his Polaroid camera, photographing them on film before creating the final screenprints. Among them was Margaret Hamilton posing as her iconic role of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. Warhol cast himself as the 1930s comic book hero, The Shadow. By placing his own recognizable face alongside these fictional characters, Warhol plays with the idea of artist as celebrity and inserts himself as a quintessential part of American culture in this era. Other prints, such as Mickey Mouse, used reference images from film and television as their base, which Warhol then manipulated with vibrant colors before embellishing the final composition with glistening diamond dust.
While these characters were synonymous with American culture, they were also deeply personal to the artist. Warhol named Walt Disney as his favorite American artist and was thrilled when, Ronald Feldman, the publisher of the series was able to obtain permission from the Disney studio to use Mickey Mouse in Myths. The portraits that make up the Myths portfolio can be read as an introspective project, Santa Claus referencing his life-long love of Christmas and Superman taking the artist back to his childhood when Superman comic books offered comfort and distraction from an immobilizing illness. The subjects Warhol chose are so significant that even forty years later viewers might still feel a sense of nostalgia when looking at these prints. Even following the artist’s death, his likeness, as featured in The Shadow, continues to be as relevant and recognizable, as his body of work inspires a new generation of onlookers.
