![margaret keane self portrait on the beach margaret keane self portrait on the beach](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cd/68/7d/cd687d358cfb5c60c003a18219cad3fe.jpg)
(This one cost $10-million.) Instead, Burton focuses on the plight of a female artist struggling for recognition in the old, pre-feminist America. It's an unusual Burton film. Apart from a supermarket scene in which Margaret imagines outsized Keane-style eyes on the faces of other shoppers, there are no pop-grotesque fantasy effects of the sort common in the director's bigger-budget pictures. This is a great story, and Tim Burton has now turned it into a breezy and rather slight movie, with Amy Adams playing Margaret Keane and Christoph Waltz in the role of Walter. Today, in her eighties, she's still painting, and her late husband's Wikipedia page accords him a different kind of fame from that which he'd once enjoyed: It describes him simply as "American plagiarist." "I can paint, and he can't." After years of dispute, Margaret filed suit to claim authorship of the Keane paintings, and after a hilarious courtroom showdown, she finally prevailed.
![margaret keane self portrait on the beach margaret keane self portrait on the beach](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/47/f3/5a47f30403e0d41cc8f782ecb7c96225.jpg)
"He was the one who promoted the paintings and sold them," she told a UPI reporter.
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In 1970, his fed-up ex-wife Margaret announced that it was actually she who had painted all those big-eyed waifs, not Walter. The paintings themselves were far outnumbered by the posters and postcards that Keane turned them into, and it was these gift-shop simulacra that made him rich.īut Keane's self-trumpeting success ("My brush is continually discovering new things," he said) was his undoing. His pictures of sad little children with big saucer-size eyes might have exemplified "heroic bad taste," as one New York museum curator put it, but museums in Spain and Belgium hung them proudly, and stars like Joan Crawford, Kim Novak and Natalie Wood collected them. In the 1960s, Walter Keane was one of the world's most famous-and possibly most derided-painters.