![]() Coolidge’s century-old paintings of dogs playing poker (two of which sold in 2005 for nearly $600,000), Big Eyes should resonate as an intimate alternative history of the women’s-liberation movement. Is Keane’s work art or kitsch? In the post-Good Taste era, that question no longer applies.Įven if Margaret Keane’s work were valued no more highly than C.M. Burton, famed for bringing an extravagant vision and precision of design detail to movie remakes of The Pee-wee Herman Show, Batman and Planet of the Apes, has collected Keane since the 1990s and commissioned Margaret’s portraits of his serial leading ladies Lisa Marie and Helena Bonham Carter. Instead, today’s plutocrats invest in what was the low art of their childhoods - vintage comic books, Norman Rockwell illustrations and rock-star guitars - or in no art, like the Keanes. Wealthy people of the American mid-century would ornament their penthouses with Jackson Pollock’s splash panels, as emblems of the most refined taste money could buy. (She’s still active at 87.) Now this tale gets a superficial, DayGlo-bright paint-over in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, with Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as the battling spouses in the Keane family circus.įifty years after the onset of Keane-mania, high-art arbiters have lost their power. Those big eyes were his big lies - a scandal that remained a secret until Margaret Keane divorced Walter, went public in a 1970 radio interview and later won a lawsuit she brought against her delusional ex-husband. What Warhol and no one else knew in the ’60s was that Walter Keane, who built the business and took all the credit, wasn’t the artist his wife Margaret was. If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.” “Keane” was the name on the phenomenally popular paintings of waifs with space-alien orbs that earned the ripe contempt of the critical establishment (back when there was one) and sold by the millions in originals, reproductions and knockoffs that flourished in every sidewalk art show from Malibu to Montmartre. ![]() “I think what Keane has done is just terrific,” Andy Warhol told Life magazine in 1965.
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