#Margaret keane self portrait movie#
#Margaret keane self portrait tv#

So I always kind of hid the fact that I was an artist.” I thought artists were weird, crazy people you know. For many years before she met him, “I didn’t want people to know that I was an artist,” she says. And at least Walter encouraged her to paint, even if it was in his self-interest. “Women stayed home and took care of the kids, and the men did everything,” she remembers. But fundamentally, she was a shy, dutiful southern woman of her era. Partly, it was pragmatic: “I couldn’t sell anybody anything,” she says, still sounding a tiny bit smitten after all these years. ”He was just so charming, he could sell anything or convince anybody of anything.” Partly it was because he threatened her with bodily harm.

She’d gone along with the scheme for a number of reasons. “I don’t really remember, but I could have.” One of the early crises in the film is when Walter has to come up with that reason why he supposedly painted all these kids, and before he came up with the post-war hungry-kids origin story, Margaret’s character jokes that maybe he just had an unnatural interest in little girls. And those eyes were searching for answers.” “I painted what was in my heart, and I think it touches other people’s hearts we all are born with this desire to know why we’re here and is there a god. “I think the paintings themselves really appeal to people,” she tells me, sipping decaf. Critics found the works treacly, but to the less-conscientiously aloof, a Keane print was aesthetically pleasing décor backed with a humanist message, and he had a blockbuster on his hands. He became a celebrity who hung out with celebrities while Margaret mostly stayed at home painting. She was prolific, churning them out obsessively in her studio, and he was a marketing impresario, even selling them as posters. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.”

#Margaret keane self portrait tv#

He told newspapers and magazine writers and TV hosts the same story, of how he started painting his big-eyed children after seeing the war’s devastation in Germany. 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.

#Margaret keane self portrait movie#

Magnin suit, which didn’t fit.”) She herself was never particularly famous before this current blitz of movie publicity for the very reason the movie dramatizes: Her husband, a real-estate salesman and untalented artist named Walter Keane, took credit for all those canvases that so tugged on the heartstrings of mid-century America.

Now, thanks to Burton, who collects Keanes, the very weird story of how this quiet Methodist woman (who to this day talks in the soft notes of Nashville, where she was born in 1927) created some of the most popular art of the 1960s, will finally become as well-known as her iconically sentimental works themselves. (She makes a cameo in the film, about which she had one complaint: “They tried to make me look like an old woman,” she says. I just never thought it would take a film to get here!” She lives about an hour outside San Francisco, where the film is set. We meet up in mid-afternoon the next day at the cocktail lounge Knave, at the Parker-Meridien Hotel. Bright-eyed, she hardly seems the worse for wear, still wearing the big-framed, blue-tinted eyeglasses - ”I like to hide behind them,” she tells me - she’d worn the for the red carpet, where she quipped for the assembled press: “I always wanted to be in MoMA.

Margaret Keane is 87 years old, an impish woman in a blue suit, a turtleneck, and jeans who’d been up until 3 o’clock in the morning December 15 for the MoMA premiere of Big Eyes, the new Tim Burton film about her, her husband, and the lies he told, very publicly, in passing her own haunted-moppet paintings off as his own, getting them quite rich and famous - by 1960s standards, anyway.