Margaret Keane Dies: Kitschy ‘Big Eyes’ Artist, Subject Of Tim Burton Biopic Was 94

deadline.com:

Margaret Keane, whose wildly popular paintings of big-eyed, melancholy children (and later celebrities with deep pockets) became one of the most widely recognized signature artistic styles of the late 20th Century – and whose long battle with her husband over his fraudulent and lucrative claims of authorship inspired the 2014 Tim Burton film Big Eyes starring Amy Adams – died Sunday at home in Napa, California.

She was 94.Her death was reported on her official Facebook page today: “We’re sad to announce that Margaret Keane, ‘The Mother of Big Eyes, our Queen, a Modern Master and Legend’ peacefully passed away Sunday morning at her home in Napa, CA, she was 94.”Her daughter Jane Swigert told The New York Times that the cause of death was heart failure.Keane’s instantly recognizable paintings of children, typically portrayed and described as waifs with huge, sad and dinner-plate-sized eyes, became massively popular in the 1950s and ’60s, at first sincerely and later as totems of kitsch as iconic as plastic pink flamingoes.According to various biographies, Keane began painting as a child, and at 18 attended the Traphagen School Of Design in New York City.

She began painting portraits in the 1950s, showing an inclination toward deliberate kitsch even then.Her career took off – or, rather, her second husband’s career – in the mid-1950s when that husband, Walter Keane, began marketing the “big eyes” paintings and selling them at the Hungry in a comedy club in San Francisco, in New York City’s Washington Square and during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Unbeknownst – at first – to Margaret, Walter Keane claimed he was the artist, with the soon-to-be familiar “Keane” signature offering the public no evidence to the contrary.Margaret