![]() Margaret ended up suing Walter concerning the origin of the Big Eyes style, and it turned out that he had real talent after all, but as a peddler and a con artist. He sounded a lot like a snake oil salesman but luckily for him, his wife produced a pretty damn good oil. His only artistic genius probably resided in his salesmanship and bringing messages from the dead might have been another ploy to rise himself in the ranks of psychics in case his paintings lost steam. He wrote in his own autobiography, the World of Keane, that his grandmother would come to him in dreams, to call him a ‘’great master’’. ![]() He hired a writer to produce a satiric book featuring him and Margaret as masters deserving of great admiration. He even seemed to believe his own propaganda. What Walter lacked in artistic talent, he had ten-fold in salesmanship. But Walter presented himself to the world as one of the painters and as the creator of Big Eyes. And in reality, she was the real creator of this ‘art naïf’ and not her husband. While Walter got busy promoting his ‘kids’, his wife Margaret worked relentlessly in her basement studio to produce these little nuggets of art. The market was inundated with cute kids or animals trying to project the same emotions and to appeal to that market. They depicted vulnerability but with a soul.īig Eyes paintings became so popular that they inspired many to produce countless imitations of their style. It was sappy and sentimental but not dramatic like real photos of starving children in the third world. So he struck gold with these paintings of semi distressed looking kids that could touch your soul without making you feel depressed. ![]() Walter Stanley Keane was a former real estate salesman who knew the value of a fad over lasting creative art. They had touched a nerve and were selling like hotcakes. I am exaggerating a tad and they were extremely popular and hung in beautiful mansions as well as in trailer park homes. The Keane’s paintings were a huge hit and in my eyes, they were not very far from velvet paintings of Elvis and Marilyn on the scale of art evolution. Her husband deplored the fact that she paid a fortune for it and had to have it shipped from the US but it was love at first sight, and except for her cat Bimbo, nothing was more enchanting in her eyes than her painting of strange kids with huge mirrors to their soul presiding over their face. My first encounter with a Big Eyes painting took place in the living room of an old aunt who was in awe of it and practically made it the centerpiece of her house if not to say, her life. When I say they, I mean that Margaret was doing the painting and Walter took care of business. Their series of paintings called Big Eyes depicted children with humongous eyes in flashy colors. Adam Parfrey who runs Feral House Books, a little house of darkness promoting ‘pure information and forbidden subjects,’ has also published a new book called Citizen Keane, telling the story of Walter and Margaret Keane who were 60s pop artists and trail blazers of Kitsch Art, right smack in the middle of the hippie glory days.
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