The American artist Margaret Keane, born in Tennessee in 1927, reached worldwide fame during the 1950s and 60s thanks to her portraits of melancholic children, women and animals painted with abnormally big eyes. It has recently been announced that she has died, aged 94. Today we celebrate her career and incredible life story.
Margaret took up painting as a child, and her trademark eyes soon populated the pages of her school textbooks. After a year at the Traphagen School Of Design in New York, she began her artistic career by painting commercial celebrity portraits.
However, it wasn’t long before she solely focused on her ‘big eyes’ portraits, at which point she was married to her second husband, Walter Keane. Margaret said that he began selling her characteristic paintings almost immediately, despite her not realising it for quite some time. As the years went on, her husband started crafting more and more of an artistic persona for himself, exhibiting her works under his own name and selling them for large amounts of money.
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In the mid-1960s, the ‘Painting Keanes’, as Walter would promote them, exploded in popularity, with $2 million in sales made in 1964 alone. Margaret’s paintings came to adorn the homes of many Hollywood actors and famous people, and were even endorsed by Andy Warhol, one of the great contemporaries of the time. Of that period, Margaret recalled that she was forced to work for up to 16 hours a day, fearing for her safety were she to tell the public the truth or stop this massively lucrative business her husband had trapped her into.
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In an interview with Variety in 2015, Margaret said that the popularity of the paintings ‘exploded so fast, and he was such a genius at promoting them … that the more and more popular they were, the deeper the hole got, and I just didn’t know how to get out or what to do’. However, Margaret would eventually get out of that hole: in 1970, after she divorced Walter Keane, she announced in a radio broadcast that she was the true artist behind the paintings — much to the shock of her contemporaries.
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During a 1986 court hearing where she sued her ex-husband for defamation, Margaret challenged Walter to a ‘paint-off’ in San Francisco’s Union Square. As Walter refused to show up, the court finally realised that she was indeed the ‘big eyes’ artist. $4 million in damages were awarded to her, though she never received anything from Walter Keane. At the time, the story so deeply captured American society that it later inspired Tim Burton to produce the 2014 award-winning film Big Eyes.
On Wednesday, the Keane estate announced in a press release that the artist had peacefully passed away at her home in Napa, California. ‘We will miss her love, creative ingenius and passion to continue to create new works up until her passing’, reads the post. Although some critics nowadays dismiss her art as middlebrow, her ironic signature style remains hugely popular with the public, and even more so her incredible life story.
