by Tyler Stallings
MARGARET KEANE: I met Walter Keane at the San Francisco Art Festival. I was doing charcoal portraits for five dollars. Walter walked by and kind of swept me off my feet.
INTERVIEWER: And about how old were you both at that time?
MARGARET: I was twenty-eight. I think he was twelve years older. And he certainly acted like an artist. He wore a beret and had a wonderful personality. He charmed anyone. We ended up getting married. He was in the real estate business although he was painting on the side. He wanted to be an artist so bad and give up on real estate. So he started to try to sell his street scenes and my portraits.
INTERVIEWER: At an art fair?
MARGARET: Yeah, we would go to art fairs. Then he took my Big Eyes paintings and his street scenes and put them in the hungry i canteen.
INTERVIEWER: Can you describe what the hungry i was?
MARGARET: It was a nightclub/bar, a very popular place, and that’s where Phyllis Diller got her start, and the Kingston Trio. Walter was really part of the scene down there, entertaining everybody. I was home painting, and he was down there selling.
INTERVIEWER: And how were you signing paintings at that time?
MARGARET: At that time, I just put “Keane” because Margaret is so long. He had “Walter Keane” on his street scenes. So this went on for a couple of years, but I didn’t realize he had been telling people he did all of them. And the children with the big eyes were selling better than the street scenes! Then we had a big controversy one night with Enrico Banducci, the owner of the hungry i. They got into a fistfight over some woman who was sitting at the bar. And somehow she got hit, accidentally, I think. It was this big thing that was on the front page of the paper, and they had a trial, and it was just farce. I don’t even know what the outcome was, but we couldn’t hang the paintings at the hungry i anymore, because Walter and Banducci weren’t speaking. So he found a space above Vanessi’s restaurant on Broadway.
INTERVIEWER: What year was this?
MARGARET: This was 1956 or 1957. So he opened this gallery and we wanted to do some posters. We’d staple ’em or glue ’em to fences, telephone poles, houses, anywhere, everywhere we could think to put ’em. And we’d go by the next day and they’d all be gone! We were so upset—we didn’t know who was taking the posters. Then in the gallery we would give them away, and when that got too expensive, we started selling them and we couldn’t print them fast enough. People were just loving them and it was snowballing. It was about this time that I found out that he was telling people that he did my paintings. Then one day, I was in the gallery and I was unpacking everything … and I found this bottom box, this great big, huge box. I was curious about what was in that. I opened it up and in it were all these Paris street scenes with the name Cenic. C-E-N-I-C. I immediately realized that he hadn’t done any of these street scenes. This man, Cenic, did them.
INTERVIEWER: Was that a teacher of his or something?
MARGARET: Well, he claimed that it was his teacher. I think what [Walter] did was take [Cenic’s] name off and put his name on. So this was a nightmare for about ten years. It was just a terrible nightmare. Of course he had me believing it was my fault that he couldn’t paint. I really was like … not physically abused but emotionally and psychologically abused, to the point where I was afraid to open my mouth in public. If I did, when we got home he’d rant and rave and say, “Why’d you say that” and “You should just keep your mouth shut.” It was pretty bad. Anyway … I’m a survivor.
INTERVIEWER: Just to summarize, you got divorced in 1965?
MARGARET: I finally got the strength to leave, and I said, I gotta put two thousand miles between us.
INTERVIEWER: And then after that, he still claimed ownership. Eventually you had to take him to court?
MARGARET: The lawyers just decided that the only way to make him stop was to sue him. So I sued him and that case is the one where I did this painting in court and won the unanimous jury decision, that I was the artist. But I just want to say … Walter was a genius at promotion, and I feel sorry for him, because he wanted so much to be an artist. He was extremely talented in what he did. He took those paintings and made them well-known because of his talent. I really think he deserves a lot of credit there.
INTERVIEWER: Let’s just jump back: Could you tell me about when you first got started painting and the use of your daughter as a model?
MARGARET: You want me to go way back to the beginning? Well, I remember that I was always drawing, and in the first grade the teacher told my mother she thought that I had talent. So my mother encouraged me, and I had an uncle who encouraged me. After school, when I was about ten, I started taking art lessons at the Watkins Art Institute in Nashville. And I was the youngest one there. Most of [the students] were in their teens, and they were drawing these wonderful pictures. I wanted to be able to do what they were doing, and I couldn’t, at that age, but it made me want to do it. I just always knew I was going to be an artist. I wanted to go to New York and study art, and I finally got there after high school. I first got a job typing and went to art school at night. Then I got married and got sidetracked a little bit, and when my daughter was a baby, I started drawing her picture. When she was about two, I think, I did my first oil painting of her. Some of my friends who had kids, they wanted me to do their children. So pretty soon I was doing quite a lot of portraits, and on all of them the eyes were big. I think when you look at a child, you notice the eyes are big. That’s kind of how the eyes started. Then I wanted to do faces and not have to make it look like a particular child, I wanted just an imaginary face—and then the eyes were even bigger in those. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was doing was painting my own inner feelings and expressing them through a child.
Walter and Margaret in Hawaii, 1958
INTERVIEWER: A lot of your early paintings were what [the art world] called the waif paintings. Can you tell me about those?
MARGARET: I started doing them to relax and to do something for myself and not have to please the sitter or the parents. I would do these sad kids because I was sad. And I was putting my feelings into them. Even though they were sad, I think they had hope. They were looking for answers … and I was looking for answers. You know, “Why are we here?” “Why is there suffering?” “Why is there injustice?” And then, when Jane was growing up, I would often use her as a model, but I would change it and make the eyes larger to express more what I was feeling. A lot of people think the eyes are the windows to the soul, and I think they express our inner feelings. I’ve also been interested in spiritual things. Deep philosophical things. So I think that comes out. And I really love children’s art. What’s important to them is the big thing—they make it larger, way out of proportion to reality sometimes. I think that’s why the eyes got bigger. I didn’t do it consciously and I didn’t realize till later why I had done it.
INTERVIEWER: When you did some of your commissions, what was it like to paint someone like Natalie Wood?
MARGARET: Natalie Wood was a perfect model. It was a challenge because she was so beautiful. I couldn’t in any way flatter her, because she was already so perfect. I’ve never had anyone sit so still. I commented on it, and she said she had been posing since she was five, so she knew how to sit just perfectly still. So while I was doing her, someone was doing her fingernails, someone was doing her toenails and someone else was doing her hair. But she was sitting there perfectly still while all these other things were going on. I think the first day she sat about six straight hours! That’s why I think it came out so good. And then later, I did Robert Wagner’s portrait.
INTERVIEWER: And how was that?
MARGARET: It was good, too, but hers was better. I like painting women better than men for some reason. I don’t know why—maybe I relate more to women. I don’t paint too many men. Once in a while I’ll do little boys. My painting that I did of Joan Crawford, she put on the cover of her book. She collected many of my paintings. She probably had twenty or more, and she loved them. When she found out the truth about who actually painted the paintings, she was just wonderful to me. She was a wonderful friend, and I don’t believe a word of what her daughter said about her.
INTERVIEWER: She put your paintings in her film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
MARGARET: Yeah, I painted her little dog, too. One summer, I spent about two months in Beverly Hills painting the Jerry Lewis family. I stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and every day in the poolhouse I’d set up my easel. Their plan was to have the butler bring in one child at a time for about a thirty-minute session, then take that child away and bring another one in. In the beginning, they were reluctant. Five boys, four dogs, and three cats, but after the first hour or so they got intrigued with it and they didn’t wanna leave when their turn was up. So I ended up with all of them in the room, chasing cats and dogs and kids, just total bedlam. But it was fun.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about painting Liberace?
MARGARET: I did his painting in the middle of the lobby at the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu. When he said he wanted me to do his painting, I thought he would want to be painted in his room. But he said, “No, I want it painted in the lobby.” So this just totally floored me. I had to sit there and paint him with about three hundred people standing around watching. And he was talking and laughing and moving around. It was a little difficult, so when I got ready to do his mouth, I asked him to please, just for a minute, close his lips and stop talking. He said, “If you have pretty teeth, you should show them.” So I put his pretty teeth in the painting.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of paint do you use? Is it strictly oil, versus acrylic?
MARGARET: I usually just paint with oil and nothing else, straight out of the tube. Sometimes I’ll put in an acrylic background, rarely. If I’m trying to do something fast and want it to dry fast, then I might paint acrylic first and then go over it with oil.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever just draw?
MARGARET: Yes, I like to draw very much. My favorite medium is oil and pencil and colored pencils. And I do a lot of mixed mediums—mixing up pastel, pen, and ink. I’m a very fast painter. I probably shouldn’t tell you how fast I paint, but I can when I have to. Like in the court, when I did that painting, in front of the jury and the judge, big eyes, little nose, and a mouth. Just that much took one hour, but that’s the fastest I ever painted. Normally it would take me two or three, four hours to do that much.
Margaret at the Keane Gallery, San Francisco, 1961–1962
INTERVIEWER: Do you have certain influences, like Modigliani?
MARGARET: Yes, I love Modigliani’s paintings and I really studied them and looked at them and copied them. Yeah, he has really influenced my work a lot.
INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about contemporary artists adopting some of your eyes?
MARGARET: Well, I’m flattered. It doesn’t really bother me too much. I’m glad they like my paintings enough to do it. It does disturb me when they’ll really try to copy it exactly and maybe even sign “Keane” on it.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think about a lot of current pop stars collecting your work? Can you talk a little bit about that?
MARGARET: I’m surprised. I’m happy when people like my work. I don’t quite know exactly why they like it, but I’m glad they do. Maybe they’re searching for answers and the paintings say something to them. I think they like the older ones better than the recent ones.
INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about that?
MARGARET: Well, when someone likes the older ones, I’m pretty sure that they have the same type of feelings that I had when I painted them. They’re wondering, Where is the world heading, what’s happening, and why am I here? And I guess that this generation is feeling the same things that we did in the sixties. Pop stars like Matthew Sweet and others seem to like my paintings, which is very flattering to me. I don’t exactly know why. I think the world situation today … Everything is so insecure and [there’s] so much injustice in the world that people are looking for something better. I think the hope for the world is God’s Kingdom, which will establish Paradise condition again, the way it was meant to be. I think young people today are searching for these things. And that must be why they like my paintings.
INTERVIEWER: How does it make you feel, that people find answers in your paintings?
MARGARET: That makes me feel very good, that I was able to paint something that they could relate to, and it might help them come to grips with their own feelings. And maybe they’ll find the same answers that I found in the Bible. That’s what I really hope. I think each person has to do their own searching. You know sometimes when people interview me, they don’t want me to talk about my spiritual beliefs. They’ll say, “You know what, Margaret, this is not a religious article.” But my religious beliefs are why I paint the way I paint … really tied in very closely. My deepest thoughts and feelings and my relationship with the Creator is the most important thing in my life and it comes out in my paintings.
Tyler Stallings was chief curator at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna, California, for the Margaret Keane and Keanabilia exhibition. He is currently Sweeney Art Gallery director at the University of California, Riverside.
