“ had me sitting in a corner,” Margaret Keane told The Guardian in 2014, “and he was over there, talking, selling paintings, when somebody walked over to me and said: ‘Do you paint too?’ And I suddenly thought-just horrible shock-‘Is he taking credit for my paintings?’” In the interview, Keane describes how Walter would require her to paint day and night with the blinds drawn so no one would know she was the artist behind the canvases. The Keane Eyes Gallery in San Francisco Photo by rulenumberone2/Flickr Keane quickly opened galleries throughout the country, with Keane prints and postcards placed in department stores and selling by the millions. Keane is the painter who enjoys international celebration for grinding out formula pictures of wide-eyed children of such appalling sentimentality that his product has become synonymous among critics with the very definition of tasteless hack work”-its popularity continued to swell outside of this inner circle. While the Keane style was not lauded by art-world critics of the era-when it was announced that the theme of the 1964 World’s Fair would be based on a Keane painting, New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that “Mr. He began with local media, and in 1961 the donation of a painting to the United Nations Children’s Fund got him an interview on The Tonight Show, where host Jack Paar referred to the work as the greatest painting he’d ever seen. Walter, a former real-estate salesman, began an aggressive push to popularize the paintings, all while claiming to be the artist behind them. In 1955 she married Walter Keane, her second husband. By age 10, she had already begun drawing figures with big, saucer eyes, a precursor to what would be her lifelong pursuit. A childhood mastoid operation caused eardrum damage that resulted in permanent hearing issues, after which Keane became fixated on eyes, which she would use to aid her in conversation due to the poor hearing. Keane was born Margaret Doris Hawkins in Nashville, Tennessee in 1927. Her dramatic rise to fame, which included her husband Walter Keane taking credit for the canvases, a claim that culminated in a court-mandated “paint off” to discern which Keane was the painter, was adapted into a 2014 film by Tim Burton titled Big Eyes. Keane died of heart failure in her home in Napa Valley, she was 94. He tried to hit me once.' The couple divorced in 1965 and she did not publicly reveal his hoax until 1970.Margaret Keane, a painter whose kitschy, doe-eyed figures became a ubiquitous part of the mid-century American visual landscape, has died. Amongst my favourite artist is a lady called Margaret Keane, who rose to fame when her ex husband Walter Keane took plagiarism to the maximum by taking credit for Margaret’s portraits of waif like children with distinctive and recognisable ‘big eyes’. She challenged her ex-husband to a public 'paint-off' in San Francisco but he failed to. After 10 years of an unhappy and dominating marriage, Margaret filed for divorce in 1965, and when remarried to a trustworthy and supportive husband in Daniel McGuire, Maragaret spoke on a radio broadcast in 1970 that she was the real creator of the ‘big eyes’. Before the trial, a paint out had been staged but Walter did not turn up, and so during the trial, the judge decided the only way to determine the true artist was to give both involved the same art supplies and time to create a new portrait of a child. Margaret finished her portrait in a total of 53 minutes and Walter never completed his portrait due to a sore shoulder complaint. Margaret was awarded 4 million pounds in damages, but never wanted the money, just her work and credit. In 2014, Tim Burton created the film ‘Big Eyes’ starring Amy Adams and Christopher Waltz and at the very end of the film stated that even now at the age of 90, Margaret Keane still paints every day. The images shown above are some of my favourite pieces of her collection, even though none of them are the waif children. These portraits of women represent a style that I am very drawn to, taking someone and recreating them how one paints and one expresses their style.
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