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Poster. 81 x 51cm. Andy Warhol's Quadrant Mickey Mouse is an intensely exuberant painting, vividly-hued in bisecting planes of lively color, depicting an icon of popular culture?Mickey Mouse. In Quadrant Mickey Mouse, Warhol illustrates the most celebrated cartoon in history in his trademark silkscreen style. He repeats the classic Mickey image four times over in a 2x2 grid as if to illustrate the ubiquity of the image itself, as he had done to great effect in other 4-part canvases such as 4 Marilyns and 4 Jackies. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the painting, though, is Warhol's abstract use of bisecting planes of color in the painting's background. The artist was an altogether brilliant colorist, and in Quadrant Mickey Mouse he experiments with vivid combinations of lavender, tangerine, pink and blue. These prisms of shimmering color intersect the Mickey image in offset geometric planes, so that each seems to be viewed through a kaleidoscope, as if passed through the prism of dreams and memory.Painted in 1981, Quadrant Mickey Mouse was created during a pivotal moment in Warhol's late career that witnessed an unprecedented flourishing of work. During the 1970s Warhol seemed to generate an endless number of society portraits that felled him from critical favor, yet the dawn of the 1980s revealed Warhol renewed and reinvigorated, as he became obsessed in a critical re-engagement with his most important paintings of the 1960s. In what would become the Reversals and Retrospectives, Warhol mined his own historic work to bring himself out of the past and into the present day. He even ventured into pure abstraction with the Shadows and Rorschachs and regained the respect of the art world intelligentsia that had previously abandoned him.It was during this intense period of reevaluation that Warhol intended to complete a series based on the characters of Walt Disney that would include both Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. A longtime Walt Disney fan (he collected original Disney acetates), Warhol also visited the summer blockbuster exhibit ?Disney Animation and Animators? on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from June to September of 1981. When asked by an interviewer if he had seen the Disney exhibit at the Whitney in 1981, Warhol responded, ?Yes. I was interested to see how other people did so much of the work. I liked the show so much that I went to see The Fox and the Hound. That movie looked like it was done 50 years ago because the backgrounds were so painterly. But I wish the Whitney show had been larger; I wanted to see more? (A. Warhol, quoted in B. Blinderman, ?Modern Myths: Andy Warhol,? Arts, October 1981; reprinted in K. Goldsmith, (ed.), I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987, New York, 2004, p. 290).
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