June 28, 2022

"Preoccupied with spiritualism and the occult as well as with her painting, Ms. Keane said nothing publicly even after discovering what her husband was up to..."

"... remaining passively complicit in the fraud for a decade. She even sat through press interviews, nodding approvingly while he told of his own artistic struggles and virtuosities. 'The whole thing just snowballed, and it was too late to say it wasn’t him who painted them,' Ms. Keane told The Times years later. 'I’ll always regret that I wasn’t strong enough to stand up for my rights.'"

17 comments:

n.n said...

Reproductive rites. Ah, "his" Choice.

Howard said...

Perhaps it was better from a marketing popularity angle for the Husband to be the front. Like her being a ghost writer.

Joe Smith said...

Those paintings are horrible.

Had she died young we wouldn't be so traumatized...

mikee said...

The movie Big Eyes is worth your time if you enjoyed this bit of art history.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1126590/

M said...

Is this the kind of woman the left is siting when they say women need protected form their own choices? I wouldn’t let a man take credit for my work, ESPECIALLY if he was my husband. What a betrayal. Why did she go along? Abuse?

madAsHell said...

Preoccupied with spiritualism and the occult as well as with her painting

As a kid my pediatrician acquired a sad-eyed painting for each of the examination rooms. The collection included cats, girls, and a clown.

I found the cats, and the girls unsettling. The eyes seemed to be a relentless call for help.

The clown was what-in-the-fucking-hell-is-that!!! disturbing. I remember thinking, there must some closets in my head that I haven't opened yet.

Yeah, so I'm not surprised by her preoccupations.

madAsHell said...

traumatized

I have company!!

Ted said...

The movie not only gave her public vindication, it implied that she used to look like Amy Adams.

Carol said...

Ah, like Colette's early books published under her husband's name. He had a regular stable of ghost writers producing for him.

At least he was a good editor.

rcocean said...

She was only married to Keane for 10 years. Seems like she did the painting, but he was the one who promoted their work and got the publicity that made the money. A lot of critics hated "their" work. Just like they hated Thomas Kinkade

William said...

Not such a bad life. Her husband, the exploitative one, knew how to publicize and sell her work. He made her work although not her famous and marketable. As Faustian bargains go, it was a pretty good deal. She certainly didn't have his gift for self promotion... Later on she got credit for her work and in such a way that made her a sympathetic figure and even more marketable. I'd like Tim Burton to make a film about my troubles and travails, and I'd like Johnny Depp to star in it.....I guess she's kitsch. I'm not particularly attracted to her paintings, but I can understand their appeal. At least, I don't think WTF as I do with some other more critically acclaimed artists.

William said...

Who's the greatest kitsch artist of all time? I give her the nod over Kinkade. I think Disney's early cartoons like Snow White used to be considered kitsch but now they have passed over into something that's sort of art. A lot of people want to classify Norman Rockwell as an artist, and some want to rank him among the kitsch illustrators whose appeal is strictly to cheap sentiments. Maybe Rockwell's achievement is that he elevates kitsch into something grand and moving and worth calling art.

effinayright said...

The clown was what-in-the-fucking-hell-is-that!!! disturbing. I remember thinking, there must some closets in my head that I haven't opened yet.
************

Have you opened the one with the John Wayne Gacey nameplate?

effinayright said...

mikee said...
The movie Big Eyes is worth your time if you enjoyed this bit of art history.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1126590/
**************

OMG! Christoph Waltz reprises his role as the murderous SS officer here....as Walter Keane!!!

Robert Cook said...

"She was only married to Keane for 10 years. Seems like she did the painting, but he was the one who promoted their work and got the publicity that made the money. A lot of critics hated "their" work. Just like they hated Thomas Kinkade."

I won't make any claims for Keane's work being great art, but I do really like her paintings. They're intended to be sentimental, but they are so strange they don't really fall into that bracket. Their strangeness is their saving grace. Kinkade's work, though, really is just syrupy schlock. Kinkade was a skilled painter, technically speaking, and he had worked for Disney at one time. (In fact, his paintings look like amped-up Disney background paintings.)

PM said...

Despite any opinion of the work, it made money and was well-known so it was chickenshit she didn't get the recognition or, depending on your taste, the blame.

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