Keith Haring Andy Mouse Portfolio For Sale

Andy Mouse is a portfolio of four silkscreen prints created by the artist in 1986. Amongst the most celebrated and famous of Haring’s works, Andy Mouse pays homage to his dear friend, Andy Warhol, and inspiration Walt Disney.  

Haring gives cartoon character Mickey Mouse a Pop Art makeover, fusing both Andy Warhol’s physical features, such as his wig, with his instantly-recognisable iconography such as the Dollar Sign. In this way, the portfolio is unequivocally postmodern: ‘It’s treating him (Warhol) like he was part of American Culture, like Mickey Mouse was’. (D. Dreager) 

In many ways, Andy Mouse is an intensely personal work. Haring met Warhol in 1982, marking the beginning of a friendship characterised by inspiration and reciprocity. Haring felt deeply indebted to Warhol’s elevation of pop culture to high art: ‘Had Andy (Warhol) not broken the concept of what art is supposed to be, I just wouldn’t be able to exist.’ Meanwhile, Haring introduced Warhol to the latest youth culture. They partied together and collaborated in their artwork (Montreux Jazz Festival, 1986). Importantly to the present portfolio, both artists shared a love of Walt Disney. Having grown up watching cartoons – his father had been an amateur cartoonist, the young Keith Haring aspired to work for the Disney company when he grew up. Taking the obsession to new heights, Warhol said: ‘I said I wanted to be Walt Disney and that if I’d had his machine [xerox machines] ten years ago, I could have made it’. Prescient to the quotation, Haring has granted Warhol’s wish in fashioning the Pop Giant as Disney’s most iconic character. 

In plate 1, the Mickey in Warhol costume appears atop a mound of 0$ Dollar Notes. Haring’s signature stylisation – broad, curved lines around his subjects to suggest movement and feeling – is seen here as in all his prints. In this case, the money is ‘radiant’, though ironically it is not real currency with 0 inscribed on the note.  

In each print of the portfolio, Andy Mouse appears in a different outfit and wig, subverting Micky’s classic black, white and red colourisation and giving him an eighties edge. The vividness of the suite also corresponds to Warhol’s knack for fashion, as he frequently used costume to create a carefully constructed self-image. 

In plate 2, Andy Mouse crowd-surfs over rainbow-coloured matchstick people. His stance impossibly cool and nonchalant against the lively crowd, the scene depicts Warhol as a part of the contemporary youth culture. Disneyfied, he is the ‘life of the party’. 

In plate 3, Warhol’s inseparability from one of his most famous symbols, the dollar sign, is again manifest. This time Andy Mouse appears on his own dollar note, gigantic in proportion to the figures which hold him up. Just as Warhol’s work was concerned with money and consumerism, by the eighties he had reached the heights of commercial success. Harring’s boldly written ‘USA’ affiliates the artist directly with not just American art but American history. 

The last plate in the portfolio is perhaps the truest visual fusion of Warhol and Mickey Mouse. Occupying a front and symmetrical space in the frame, Andy Mouse stands in an all familiar cartoon position, with his signature overlarge feet and ears. All the hallmarks of Haring’s style –  flat, bright colours and broad lines and humour combine to create one of the most stylish pictures. Decades after the portfolio’s creation, the iconography of Andy Mouse endures today in the world of fashion and commercial collaborations.