Farewell to Margaret Keane, the painter who inspired the film Big Eyes

U.S. painter Margaret Keane (née Peggy Doris Hawkins), famous for her paintings of large-eyed subjects and at the center of a case involving the appropriation of her work by her husband Walter Keane, passed away last June 26 in Napa, California, to the point of prompting the great director Tim Burton to dedicate the film Big Eyes to her, a title that echoes the best-known feature of Keane’s subjects.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 15, 1927, she began drawing as a child and then attended the Traphagen School of Design in New York City at the age of eighteen. She began working as a dress and crib decorator in the 1950s, while it was shortly after that that she began her career as a portrait painter, focusing mainly on women, children and animals, always with large eyes (a characteristic developed from an accident that occurred to her as a child, when she suffered permanent damage to her eardrum during an operation that led her to have to read people’s eyes more carefully in order to understand them). The painter met her future husband Walter Keane, whom she married in 1955 in Honolulu, Hawaii, in the mid-1950s. Keane, to help her, began selling her work in San Francisco, where the two resided: however, Keane passed off his wife’s work as his own, to the point of even holding a solo exhibition of his own in 1957. The works achieved great commercial success and were shown in several exhibitions. Margaret knew that her husband was presenting the works as if they had been painted by him, but she did not immediately reveal the deception because, she would later state, she feared retaliation.

It was not until 1970 that Margaret Keane announced, over the radio, that she was the true author of the works that had been attributed to her husband. A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner then organized a live painting session in which both she and Walter would participate: the latter, however, did not show up. The case then ended up in court after Margaret sued Walter in 1986 a judge ordered a live painting session, but while Walter (from whom she had meanwhile divorced in 1965) refused to participate citing health reasons, Margaret painted her work in less than an hour. In the end, the trial proved Margaret Keane right by awarding her $4 million in damages.

Among the artists who influenced her work, Margaret Keane cited Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, and Pablo Picasso. However, despite the great commercial success and fame she gained, she did not receive the same critical acclaim.

Farewell to Margaret Keane, the painter who inspired the film Big Eyes

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