Margaret was the painter of the big eyes – every one of them. He had been telling his patrons a giant lie. “He had me sitting in a corner,” she tells me, “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?’” One night Margaret decided to go to the club with him. While comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby performed onstage, out at the front, Walter sold his big-eyed-children paintings. The centre of Walter’s universe in the mid-1950s was a San Francisco beatnik club, The Hungry i. Margaret’s memory of their first meeting is quite different. Later that night, his memoir continues, Margaret told him: “You are the greatest lover in the world.” They married. He wouldn’t become a phenomenon for another few years. This conversation apparently took place at an outdoor art exhibition in San Francisco in 1955. Walter and Margaret Keane work side by side in 1961. Your perspective and the sadness you portray in the faces of the children make me want to touch them.” The children in your paintings are so sad. “You are the greatest artist I have ever seen. It’s from his 1983 memoir, The World of Keane: “I love your paintings,” she told me. This, for instance, is how he describes his first meeting with Margaret, the woman now sitting opposite me in Napa. According to his biographers, Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, he was a drinker and a lover – of women and of himself. Walter himself was not a melancholic man. They just seemed so innocent and searching. They were dressed as harlequins and ballerinas. Some of the children held sad, big-eyed poodles in their arms. But a great number of others, who wanted something more melancholic, went for Walter’s sad, big-eyed children. Some of them – those who wanted their homes to express upbeat whimsy – opted for paintings of dogs playing pool or dogs playing poker. The American suburb had just been invented and millions of people suddenly had a lot of wall space to fill. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.”įifteen years later and Keane was an art sensation. As he would later write: “As if goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, ragged little victims of the war with their bruised, lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. And there he was, staring heartbroken at the big-eyed children fighting over scraps of food in the rubbish. A young American named Walter Keane was in Europe to learn how to be a painter. “I really feel it.” She is the last person you’d expect to be a participant in one of the great art frauds of the 20th century. “Jehovah looks after me every day,” she says. She hands me Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets too. ![]() “Would you like some macadamia nuts?” she asks. Sitting unobtrusively in the corner is 87-year-old Margaret Keane. A Siamese cat weaves in and out of my legs. Inside, a family of devout Jehovah’s Witnesses bustles around, offering me a cheese plate. There’s a sweet, small suburban house in the vineyards of Napa, northern California.
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