Margaret Keane, artist whose ‘Big Eyes’ paintings were passed off as his own by her controlling husband – obituary

Margaret Keane, who has died aged 94, was an American artist whose kitschy paintings of big-eyed children became a sensation in the 1950s and 1960s, when they sold in their millions around the world in prints and postcards – though under the name of her husband Walter, who passed them off as his own.

The story of his deception and the way the truth finally came out in court inspired Tim Burton’s 2014 film Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.

Walter Keane claimed to have trained as an artist in Paris then become an estate agent in California, before his love of art overcame commerce and he decided to devote himself to his paintings, inspired by the enormous, staring eyes of starving children he had seen in Germany at the end of the war fighting over scraps of food.

“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,” he wrote in a 1983 memoir, The World of Keane. “Here my life as a painter began in earnest.”

There was one small problem: his story was a lie from start to finish. Walter Keane had never studied art and had never been to Paris. It was Margaret who was the painter. Kept a virtual prisoner in their home, she churned out canvases by the dozen in a tiny studio for 16 hours a day. Walter would then take the credit for himself.

While he did not know one end of a paintbrush from the other, he had a genius for marketing, using the latest print technology to produce hundreds of thousands of posters of Margaret’s work, which older Telegraph readers may recall from visits to Woolworths in the 1960s. In 1964 Keane prints alone grossed $2 million.

Hollywood stars such as Natalie Wood and Joan Crawford queued up to have their portraits painted by Walter Keane, who told them not to bother to sit for him: all they had to do was provide a photograph.

Margaret, meanwhile, was banned from having her own friends, and as she told The Guardian in 2014: “The door was always locked, the curtains closed... when [Walter] wasn’t home he’d usually call every hour to make sure I hadn’t gone out. I was in jail.”

Once he gave her a month to do a huge painting “to hang in the United Nations or somewhere”. The painting, called Tomorrow Forever, depicted a multicultural throng of sad-eyed urchins standing on a celestial staircase.

The organisers of the 1964 World’s Fair hung it in their Pavilion of Education and Walter was so elated that he claimed his dead grandmother had come to him in a dream and told him: “Michelangelo has put your name up for nomination as a member of our inner circle saying that your masterwork Tomorrow Forever will live in the hearts and minds of men as has his work on the Sistine Chapel.”

Others were less impressed. Reviewing the picture for The New York Times, John Canaday wrote: “This tasteless hack work contains about 100 children and hence it is about 100 times as bad as the average Keane.” The World’s Fair removed the painting.

For years, Margaret Keane said nothing about the deception. But slowly the Keane marriage fell apart, due in large part to Walter’s bullying and philandering, and in 1964 Margaret fled their home in San Francisco and took a flight to Honolulu.

In 1970, after remarrying and becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, she told a journalist the truth – that she had painted the pictures, and not Walter. The story made headlines but was dismissed by Walter, who described his ex-wife as a “boozing, sex-starved psychopath” jealous of his success.

In 1986 Margaret sued Walter and USA Today for claiming that he was the one behind the paintings. In court the judge ordered that the warring parties each be given a canvas and told to paint a big-eyed child.

Margaret completed hers in 53 minutes. Walter refused even to try, complaining that he had hurt his shoulder.

The judge found in Margaret’s favour and awarded her $4 million in damages, though she never received a cent, Walter having drunk the money away.

The older of two children of an insurance agent father and a teacher mother, she was born Margaret Doris Hawkins in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 6 1927. She described herself later as a shy, sickly child who found refuge in drawing.

She attributed her “big-eyed” style in part to a mastoid operation at the age of two which had damaged her hearing so that, to understand what people were saying, she studied their faces, and particularly their eyes.

She studied at art school in Nashville and later at the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York.

In 1948 she married Frank Ulbrich, with whom she had a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce and in 1955 she met Walter Keane at an art fair in San Francisco.

According to Walter’s account of the occasion, Margaret came up to him to tell him how much she loved his paintings. “You are the greatest artist I have ever seen,” she supposedly said. “You are also the most handsome.” Later on the same evening she told him: “You are the greatest lover in the world.”

Margaret’s memory of the occasion was rather different. None the less, she agreed to marry him and was astonished to find that, after years of struggling to find buyers, within a few months her paintings were selling like hot cakes.

She claimed that it was only when she accompanied her husband to the San Francisco club, The hungry i, that she discovered the truth. When a customer asked her “Do you paint too?” she realised that her husband was taking the credit for her work.

She said that she confronted him and told him to stop, but that Walter had insisted that so as to avoid lawsuits and capitalise on “their” success, the lie had to continue. For most of the next decade she went along with the scam, even nodding approvingly during her husband’s press interviews when he boasted about his career.

“The whole thing just snowballed, and it was too late to say it wasn’t him who painted them,” she told The New York Times later. “I’ll always regret that I wasn’t strong enough to stand up for my rights.”

Sometimes she suggested that she had remained silent out of fear: “All along he said: ‘If you ever tell anyone I’m going to have you knocked off.’ I knew he knew a lot of Mafia people. He really scared me.”

There may have been an element of self-interest, however. After all, she continued to go along with the deception for five years after her divorce, under a secret agreement that Walter would continue to sell her paintings as his own and she would receive a share of the profits.

Walter, she recalled, “could charm anyone. And you’ve got to remember that back in the Fifties there was a lot of prejudice against women artists. There weren’t that many of them, and on the whole their work didn’t sell.”

After her divorce from Walter, in 1966 she married Dan McGuire, a sports reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser.

Walter, meanwhile, descended into full-blown alcoholism. A psychologist subsequently diagnosed him with “delusional disorder”.

Dan McGuire died in 1983. Walter Keane died in 2000, still maintaining that Margaret’s pictures were his.

Margaret Keane is survived by her daughter.

Margaret Keane, born September 15 1927, died June 26 2022