#MARGARET KEANE PAINTINGS MARGARET KEANE SELF PORTRAIT MOVIE#

25, the story will go wide with the release of Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes,” a film starring Amy Adams as Margaret and Christoph Waltz as the charmingly chilling Walter.įor Margaret, who still paints daily, the movie is a chance to firmly establish who created the sad-eyed portraits that became a phenomenon. He tells people that her work is his, and when the oil paintings take off like an art world equivalent of the hula hoop, the artist goes along. A divorced painter with a young daughter falls for a real estate broker longing to be an artist. In our culture of reality TV and Facebook confessionals, the story of Margaret and Walter Keane almost sounds too absurd to be true. “It went against everything I knew was right. “I had to lie to my daughter every day,” she says, sitting in her living room, surrounded by her paintings. Never mind that it was Walter, her husband at the time, who launched the art world lie that seduced the media and movie stars and landed him on “The Tonight Show.” As he charmed the public, she remained locked in a smoky studio, pumping out the portraits of doe-eyed children that became a profitable fad in the 1950s and ‘60s.ĭecades after the deceit, Margaret, a whisper of a woman with gray hair, still quivers as she recounts her role in Walter’s scam. Photo for The Washington Post by Randi Lynn Beach

Margaret keane paintings margaret keane self portrait