It was also available at mainstream locations like supermarkets and gas stations. In researching the true story behind the Big Eyes movie, we discovered that the popularity of the big-eye paintings soared when the Keanes started to mass produce the images for sale as posters, on postcards, china plates, refrigerator magnets, etc., making the art affordable to the masses. Were the big-eye paintings really as popular as they are in the movie? She wanted to leave him then but didn't know how she would support her daughter. She attempted to instruct him, but says "it was just impossible." Walter told her she wasn't teaching him right. In order to appease Margaret and make up for his lie, the real Walter Keane asked her to teach him how to paint the big-eyed children. The movie implies that Walter never tried to paint himself. I lost all respect for him and myself, and lived in a nightmare." -SFGate While we were fighting this out at home, the paintings were just flying off the walls. "Back then, women kind of went along with their husbands, didn't rock the boat," Margaret says. I stayed home painting a lot of children with different city backgrounds. People already think I painted the big eyes and if I suddenly say it was you, it'll be confusing and people will start suing us." -The GuardianĪs to why she didn't sell the paintings herself, Margaret told LIFE Magazine in 1970, "Every night Walter went down to sell the paintings at a San Francisco night spot called The Hungry i. People don't want to think I can't paint and need to have my wife paint. People are more likely to buy a painting if they think they're talking to the artist. Margaret says that Walter told her, "We need the money. When Margaret Keane discovered Walter was taking credit for her paintings that he was selling at The Hungry i beatnik club, they were two years into their marriage and had been happy until that point. Why did Margaret Keane go along with the lie? And they just got bigger and bigger and bigger." -SFGate "When I'm doing a portrait, the eyes are the most expressive part of the face. "Children do have big eyes," says Margaret. In the movie, Amy Adams character reasons that she paints the eyes big because the "eyes are the windows to the soul," a sentiment that the real Margaret Keane has echoed herself. "I was actually putting my own feelings into that child I was painting" ( Big Eyes Featurette). "Those sad children were really my own deep feelings that I couldn't express in any other way," said Margaret Keane in a 2014 interview with The Guardian. In speaking about the characteristic big eyes given to the children in the paintings, Walter told LIFE Magazine, "Nobody could paint eyes like El Greco and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane." ![]() Here my life as a painter began in earnest." While Walter might have seen downtrodden, unhappy children in postwar Europe, he completely lacked the skill to paint them. He once wrote, "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. Like in the movie, he told stories of the big-eyed, lost children fighting over scraps of food from the garbage, which broke his heart. In describing what inspired him to paint big-eyed children, American Walter Keane talked of his supposed time in Europe following WWII, starting in Berlin in 1946. ĭid Walter Keane really tell people the paintings were inspired by war-ravaged children he had observed in Europe? "We kept on finding all these quotes from Walter Keane in this gossip column in San Francisco and we had never even heard of this gossip column before … He made it his beat and his column is a hoot and he was obsessed with Walter, and Walter realized it was a way to plug his business, so Walter would supply him with one quote after another."ĭespite being loosely based on San Francisco Examiner columnist Dick Nolan, fellow screenwriter Scott Alexander says that much of the character's persona was inspired by the suit-wearing, cocktail-drinking journalists and press agents seen hustling each other in the 1957 Burt Lancaster/Tony Curtis movie The Sweet Smell of Success. "What's funny is he came from our initial research," says screenwriter Larry Karaszewski. Is the San Francisco gossip columnist and narrator, Dick Nolan, based on a real person?
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