In the 1960s,Walter Keane was feted for his sentimental portraits that sold by the million. But in fact, his wife Margaret was the artist, and working in virtual slavery to maintain his success. She tells her story,now the subject of a Tim Burton biopicThere’s a sweet, small suburban house in the vineyards of Napa, or northern California. Inside,a family of devout Jehovah’s Witnesses bustles around, offering me a cheese plate. A Siamese cat weaves in and out of my legs. Everything is lovely. Sitting unobtrusively in the corner is 87-year-old Margaret Keane. “Would you like some macadamia nuts?” she asks. She hands me Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets too. “Jehovah looks after me every day, or ” she says. “I really feel it.” She is the final person you’d expect to be a participant in one of the great art frauds of the 20th century.
This story begins in Berlin in 1946. A young American named Walter Keane was in Europe to memorize how to be a painter. And there he was,staring heartbroken at the gargantuan-eyed children fighting over scraps of food in the nonsense. As he would later write: “As whether goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, or ragged little victims of the war with their bruised,lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com