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Walter Keane Quotes (1915-2000)
Writer, Poet, Artist
About Walter Keane
Walter Stanley Keane (7 October 1915β27 December 2000) was an American plagiarist who became famous in the 1960s as claimed painter of a series of widely reproduced paintings depicting vulnerable waifs with enormous eyes. The paintings were in fact painted by his wife, Margaret Keane. When she made this fact public, Walter Keane retaliated with a USA Today article that again claimed he had done the work. In 1986, Margaret Keane sued Walter and USA Today; in the subsequent slander suit, the judge demanded that the litigants paint a painting in the courtroom, but Walter declined, citing a sore shoulder. Margaret then produced a painting for the jurors in fifty-three minutes and the jury awarded her damages of $4 million. The subject of Walter and Margaret Keane life together was depicted in the 2014 Tim Burton film Big Eyes.
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βI don't really care what people think of me. Whatever anyone may say, I've helped the whole art world, just as Picasso and DalΓ have. I've made people aware of painting, which makes them buy more, just like they go buy more records and books once they're exposed.β
βMy psyche was scarred in my art student days in Europe, just after World War II, by an ineradicable memory of war-wracked innocents. In their eyes lurk all of mankind's questions and answers. If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young, he wouldn't need a road map. 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!"β
βWell, I first, uh, started doing this after World War II when I was kind of tramping around France, Germany, and the lowlands, and I came upon these frightened, waif-type children, and, uh, they actually looked like rats running around and they acted like it. And, uh, I started painting this type of thing of these chiβthese children, they didn't even seem to know whyβthese children didn't even seem to know how to talk; they couldn't even pray. And it started like, uh, an artist workβit-it doesβyou don't know how to talk about it, but the painting can talk for you, and I think this is the difference between an artist and a poet and a writer: in other words, an artist, uh, paints what he has to say, where other people do it in, uh, in more verbal type ofβ¦β
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Jane Howard on Walter Keane
βIt takes dispassionate bravado to speak of oneself in the third person. Walter has such bravado: it is one of the chief reasons for his success.β
Source on Walter Keane 5 quotes
βHe can't paint eyes. He couldn't learn to paint at all.β
About Walter Keane
Walter Stanley Keane (7 October 1915β27 December 2000) was an American plagiarist who became famous in the 1960s as claimed painter of a series of widely reproduced paintings depicting vulnerable waifs with enormous eyes. The paintings were in fact painted by his wife, Margaret Keane. When she made this fact public, Walter Keane retaliated with a USA Today article that again claimed he had done the work. In 1986, Margaret Keane sued Walter and USA Today; in the subsequent slander suit, the judge demanded that the litigants paint a painting in the courtroom, but Walter declined, citing a sore shoulder. Margaret then produced a painting for the jurors in fifty-three minutes and the jury awarded her damages of $4 million. The subject of Walter and Margaret Keane life together was depicted in the 2014 Tim Burton film Big Eyes.