There are no mice in cave art. Stone age artists were too awed by mammoths to notice the tiny rodents. But by the time of the Roman empire, mice appear in mosaics, stealing the remnants of banquets while Roman cats fail to catch them. And mice have been depicted at play ever since, in just about every human habitat. One of their favourites is the artist’s studio: a messy setting with lots of materials, from the smelly to the potentially edible.
The tidying mouse in wildlife photographer Rodney Holbrook’s film has gone viral after being caught by a night vision camera. This little creature has us all charmed – but it’s hardly the first time an artist has noticed little intruders in the workspace. Bruce Nauman’s video masterpiece Mapping the Studio I and II, a three-screen epic study of randomness and chance, may seem far removed from Holbrook’s mousy footage yet it has similar origins.
Nauman was inspired to set up his night-vision camera after mice invaded his studio. “We had a big influx of field mice that summer in the house and in the studio,” he said. “They were so plentiful, the cat was getting bored with them. I was sitting around the studio being frustrated because I didn’t have any new ideas. What I had was this cat and the mice, and I happened to have a video camera in the studio that had infrared capability.” The mice are the stars of this nocturnal show, their madcap dashes making tracks of chance through the studio space that’s like a whole universe to them.
Nauman may have done the whole mice-caught-on-infrared-camera thing first, but artists were noticing their little guests long before that. In Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 engraving Adam and Eve, there’s a tiny visitor at Adam’s naked feet: a plump mouse in paradise. Next to it, a sleepy cat fails to lash out at the cheeky rodent. This is the moment before the Fall, and soon all hell will break loose, but it’s hard to shake the impression that this is an everyday glimpse of Dürer’s house or workshop, when he watched a real mouse, and his cat fail to do its job.
Dürer was a formidable observer of animals but you get the same sense of a great studio moment in an early 20th-century sketch by German artist Marcus Behmer. This time, however, there is a tragic twist: the artist noticed a shrew mouse caught in a trap one morning in his studio, and portrays it – alive but doomed, its little body pinned by the cruel device. Behmer had good reason to identity with this victim. He was one of the first German artists to come out as gay and would later by imprisoned for two years for homosexuality by the Nazis: a mouse caught in history’s trap.
That image of modern history’s victims as mice caught in an immense systemic snare is brilliantly sustained in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which manages to use the anthropomorphic conventions of children’s comics to recover his father’s memories of surviving the Holocaust. Mice metaphors abound. It shouldn’t succeed but it does.
Maus puts a terrifying twist on the modern world’s most iconic mouse, Mickey, whose early renderings by Walt Disney and his artists have just gone out of copyright. Mickey Mouse is arguably a US masterpiece and continues to inspire pop artists everywhere. Keith Haring teased his friend Andy Warhol by creating a cartoon character called Andy Mouse: this hybrid has Andy’s wig and glasses with Mickey’s huge round ears. He is carried aloft by an ecstatic disco crowd and stands in a heap of cash that comes right up to his shorts.
If Andy Mouse is an American sellout, the face of Mickey becomes a grotesque mask of empty, psychotic modern evil in Jake and Dinos Chapman’s adjustments to the war art of Goya, giving a prisoner who is about to be executed a pleasing purple mouse face with Disneyesque ears.
We’re a long way from nature now. Modern art’s pop cartooning can turn mice into symbols of cuteness or horror or even cute horror, regardless of the rodents’ scampering reality. Yet behind that modern mousology lie the actual antics of mice, intruding in studios and on artist’s eyes. Ever since ancient Roman artists added them to their food scenes, mice have been nibbling away at still lifes. You can picture Dutch and Flemish painters carefully arranging cheese, bread and meat on a tabletop to paint, only to come back the next morning to find mice have taken a large nibble. So they include the mice in the paintings, making them symbols of entropy and ruin, as in Lodewik Susi’s 1619 scene Still Life with Mice.
In his 1923 work The Barbed Noose and Mice, Paul Klee paints four flat silhouettes of the rodents inhabiting mazelike shapes: from stealing cheese in still life paintings they have evolved to attack the purity of abstract art. While Klee’s composition is enigmatic, his mice are all too comically recognisable, bringing high modernism down to earth.
It was in Victorian Britain that observation and fantasy came together to produce some of the world’s most appealing mice. Pre-Raphaelite painter Rosa Brett portrayed country mice up close with haunting empathy in her 1867 painting The Field Mice at Home and other works. That intimate English eye for murine life is taken to sublime heights by Beatrix Potter, a naturalist and a storyteller who grew up in Victorian England and lived into the second world war. Her mice can be destructive. They can also be nocturnal, fairy-like helpers. The Tailor Mouse can read a newspaper while sitting on a thimble and still look every hair an actual mouse.
Potter would surely have enjoyed the tidying mouse video – for it seems to confirm her wildest anthropomorphic dreams.
