Walter Keane always said he was inspired to create his extraordinary paintings by the haunting children he saw in the streets of post-war Berlin while he was studying art.
‘In their eyes lurk all of mankind’s questions and answers,’ he said solemnly. ‘I wanted other people to know about those eyes, too. I want my paintings to clobber you in the heart and make you yell, “do something!”’
He also liked to repeat the saying that the ‘eyes are the windows of the soul’.
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Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams taking the lead roles of Walter and Margaret Keane in new film Big Eyes
For him, they were also the windows to a fortune.
For much of the Fifties and Sixties, the American was the world’s top-selling artist, his famous oils of sad-looking waifs with enormous, often tearful eyes were everywhere.
Hollywood stars including Joan Crawford, Natalie Wood and Kim Novak didn’t just collect the originals, they even commissioned Keane to paint ‘big-eyed’ portraits of themselves.
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ShareMillions of ordinary fans made do with prints for their suburban homes.
As with the Mona Lisa, it was said that if you looked at the children long enough, their stares would follow you around the room.
The cognoscenti may have dismissed it as sentimental kitsch but what did they know?
Walter Keane was a multi-millionaire.
One of the 'Big Eyes' paintings Walter Keane passed off as his own - it was actually painted by his wife, Margaret
A brilliant showman and tireless self-publicist, the ebullient Walter became a star, a drink permanently in his hand as he sounded off about partying with the Beach Boys, the naked frolicking in the pool of his California mansion and the three girls waiting for him in his bed.
He even became a celebrity spokesman for the world’s starving children...when he wasn’t cruising around San Francisco posing in his white Cadillac convertible.
He boasted about his genius. ‘Nobody painted eyes like El Greco and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane,’ he told Life magazine.
Charging up to $50,000 for each picture, Walter Keane was such a lucrative art phenomenon that even Andy Warhol admitted he was impressed.
There was only one problem.
Keane hadn’t created a single one of the coveted paintings, indeed he couldn’t paint to save his life.
The man who loved to pose for photographers, paintbrush in hand as he put the finishing touch on a canvas, was a complete fraud.
The artist was in fact his quiet, dignified wife, Margaret — kept a virtual prisoner in a backroom of their huge home, churning out pictures while Walter lapped up the acclaim and squandered the millions she earned.
She finally spilt the beans on one of the most extraordinary frauds in art history in 1970.
Even then, her quest for justice and belated recognition took 16 more years as her shameless husband denied everything.
It was to take her turning up in court and challenging Keane to each do a painting in front of a judge and jury to finally reveal who was the Big Eyes artist and who wasn’t.
The unbelievable tale has been dramatised by director Tim Burton (himself an ardent collector of Keane paintings) in a forthcoming Hollywood feature film, tipped for next year’s Oscars.
Big Eyes stars Amy Adams as the downtrodden Margaret and Christoph Waltz as her monstrous husband.
Margaret (pictured) was kept a virtual prisoner in a backroom of their huge home, churning out pictures while her husband Walter lapped up the acclaim and squandered the millions she earned with her paintings
Margaret, now 87, has a cameo role as an old lady sitting on a bench.
What we know as fact is this: Walter Keane really did study art in Paris in the late Forties.
He also visited war-ravaged Berlin. Meanwhile Margaret had been drawing children with big eyes since she was a lonely painfully shy girl growing up in Bible Belt Tennessee.
Those images of mournful, doe-eyed children, she later revealed, were reflections of her own unhappiness.
Margaret was eking out a living painting silk ties at fairgrounds when she met Keane at the San Francisco art festival in 1954.
He was a divorced estate agent, 17 years her senior.
She admits the charismatic Keane ‘swept me off my feet’ and they married the following year.
Keane discovered the popularity of Margaret’s early big-eyed waif paintings by accident — using them in posters to advertise a new art gallery he was setting up in San Francisco.
The posters were torn down in hours and he was inundated with requests to buy copies.
As Margaret signed her paintings with her married name it was easy for Walter to pass them off as his own
The pictures soon became hip to hang in local beatnik homes.
As Margaret always signed her paintings with her married name — Keane — it was easy for him to pass them off as his, without even telling his wife about his cruel deception.
It was only two years into their marriage, that Margaret discovered the truth when a friend of his asked if she painted ‘too’.
When she challenged Keane, he fobbed her off.
It was just a sales gimmick, he said.
People liked to believe he was the painter as he had created such an appealing backstory about the waifs in Berlin.
He asked her to teach him how to paint the children, but he simply couldn’t manage it.
To her lasting regret, the timid Margaret decided to keep quiet, even standing beside her husband in interviews and nodding sagely as he described his brilliant creative process.
As word spread, the price for an original Big Eyes shot into four figures and Keane opened a new gallery in New York.
He and Margaret moved to a grand house outside the city.
He left her to paint 16 hours a day as he enjoyed the high life, cheating on her with other women.
Even their servants didn’t know what she was doing, tucked away in a studio where the door was kept locked and the curtains always drawn.
Margaret (pictured) eventually divorced Walter in 1965 telling a court he was ‘jealous, critical and unpleasant’
Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams taking the lead roles of Walter and Margaret Keane in new film Big Eyes
When Walter was away, he would call every hour to make sure she hadn’t gone out.
'I was like a prisoner,’ she said.
Walter’s fame soon went to his head.
He would talk about himself in the third person, comparing himself to Gauguin and El Greco as he even suggested his paintings would do for the world’s abused children what Picasso’s Guernica did to expose the horrors of war.
Hollywood stars including Joan Crawford, Natalie Wood and Kim Novak (pictured left to right) did not just collect the originals, they even commissioned Keane to paint ‘big-eyed’ portraits of themselves
As his wits were increasingly dulled by heavy drinking, Keane didn’t see disaster heading his way — Margaret finally had enough of him.
In 1965, she divorced him, telling a court he was ‘jealous, critical and unpleasant’.
Now 38, she moved to Hawaii and remarried, this time to an affable local sports journalist who built up her fragile self-confidence, crushed by Keane’s bullying.
By then the hype over the Big Eyes phenomenon was starting to fade, in part because of competition from imitators.
In 1970, having decided she wasn’t going to lie any more if anybody asked her about the Big Eyes paintings, she finally told an interviewer Keane never painted them.
She challenged him to a high noon ‘paint-off’ in San Francisco’s Union Square so the world could ‘see who can paint eyes’.
He didn’t show up, of course.
Margaret became a Jehovah’s Witness and says she finally found happiness.
Amy Adams as Margaret Keane in Big Eyes - when her relationship with Walter dissolved, Margaret took him to court, leading to one of the most bizarre things to ever happen during a legal proceeding - a paint off
She continued to paint her saucer-eyed waifs but now they had smiles on their faces, reflecting her own contentment, she said.
Keane, meanwhile, moved for a few years to Europe while the controversy cooled off.
He was still painting, too, he insisted.
However, rather conveniently, he insisted his recent work had been lost at sea when a ship went down.
Tim Burton directs the biopic Big Eyes
In 1986, he publicly alleged Margaret had only laid claim to creating the paintings because she thought he was dead.
She sued him for libel and met him in court, the first time they had laid eyes on each other in more than 20 years.
Asked why had she kept mum about the deception for so long, she told how he’d threatened to kill her and her daughter, Jane, who also testified on behalf of her mother.
Margaret rounded off her testimony with a 53-minute painting she did in court of a Big Eyes child.
When asked by her lawyers for a similar demonstration, Keane said he couldn’t, as he had a sore shoulder.
The jury awarded Margaret $4 million but Keane quickly claimed bankruptcy.
Deserted by his famous friends, he slunk off into the shadows and a life of poverty.
He died aged 85 in 2000.
‘Walter missed his calling, he should have been an actor,’ said Margaret years later.
Looking at her mawkish pictures today, it’s ironic to think that so innocent a subject matter could produce such a contemptible fraud.
Big Eyes is in US cinemas from Christmas Day.
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