“The whole thing just snowballed, and it was too late to say it wasn’t him who painted them,” she said. Margaret divorced Ulbrich in 1955 after meeting and marrying Walter.Īfter their divorce, in 1965, Margaret agreed to Walter continuing to sell and promote her work he continued to take the bulk of the credit, and she remained silent on the matter. “They are the most expressive part of the face, and they just got bigger and bigger.” Her early work staked out her interests: she decorated children’s clothing and cribs, and did portraits of women, children and pets. After high school, she spent a year at Traphagen School of Fashion, New York, then, in 1948, aged 21, married Frank Ulbrich and had a daughter, Jane. Her mother encouraged her shy daughter’s artistic talent at 10 she took art classes at Watkins Institute in Nashville. Born in Nashville, she was the daughter of Jessie (nee McBurnett) and David Hawkins, an insurance agent. Margaret came by her obsession with eyes as a child, when a mastoid operation caused hearing loss she began concentrating on people’s eyes to better understand what they said. Margaret Keane talking about her art and its difficult story, explored in Tim Burton’s 2014 film Big Eyes A Keane painting of Caroline and John-John Kennedy hung in the White House. The couple were, however, pulling in more than $2m a year (roughly $19m, or £16m, today) and Keane had made portraits of celebrities including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liberace, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Nevertheless, this was the year of Susan Sontag’s famous essay Notes on “Camp”, and Keane’s style of kitsch was not trying to “dethrone the serious”, as Sontag wrote. If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.” But Andy Warhol got to the essence of the debate when he said: “It has to be good. Shortly afterwards, the painting was removed from the show on the grounds of “bad taste and low standards”. The New York Times art critic John Canaday reviewed it as a “formula picture of … appalling sentimentality” and said that the Keane “product has become synonymous with hackwork”. The work, Tomorrow Forever, depicted a line of big-eyed children stretching back to the horizon, like refugees in an empty world. In 1964, a huge painting of theirs was chosen to hang in the Hall of Education at the New York World’s Fair. “I was in this trap,” she later explained, “and I was getting in deeper and deeper.” Margaret, initially persuaded by his argument they could sell more paintings if buyers believed he was the artist, and eventually fearful he would ruin her life if she told the truth, went along. But Walter made himself the focus, claiming he was the real artist and she was just a dabbling amateur. In 1961 he got huge publicity after donating a painting of children to Unicef and appearing on TV on the Tonight Show the media loved the story of “the painting Keanes”. I was in this trap, and I was getting in deeper and deeper He began selling her work, which got noticed at the Hungry I, a popular comedy club, and by 1957 he was travelling to sell the paintings in New Orleans, Chicago and New York, and promoting them as his own. Margaret met Walter, a smooth-talking real estate salesman and amateur painter, in a cafe in San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach in 1955, and they married the same year. This was the story at the heart of Tim Burton’s 2014 film Big Eyes, in which Margaret and Walter were played by Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Margaret’s role was progressively diminished, and her claim to being the actual creator was not decided until more than three decades later, after Walter backed out of a judge-ordered “paint-off”. Yet it is a different controversy for which she may be remembered, which is, that her husband Walter Keane fraudulently took artistic credit, while she painted for 16 hours a day to satisfy demand for the work, originally presented publicly as a joint effort, and always signed simply “Keane”. At the height of her success, in the mid-1960s, they also engendered a spirited debate as to whether this work, denounced by critics, could even be counted as art at all. Her paintings of children whose big eyes seemed to express a fearful innocence and vulnerability were so popular that they were hung in museums and galleries across the world, generated endless publicity and spawned an industry of countless reproductions. Margaret Keane, who has died aged 94, was one of the world’s most popular artists.
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