Keane Big Eyes

"People either love them or hate them.  There's no middle ground."

- Margaret Keane

Believe it or not, these kitschy paintings of rather creepy, undernourished and doleful waifs with extraordinary BIG eyes - which eerily follow you around the room no matter where you stand - were the best-selling art of the 1960s.


San Francisco artist Margaret Keane came up with the idea for the "Big Eyes" style after seeing the homeless post-war orphans of Europe while studying art in Paris during the 1940s.  Keane's paintings commonly depicted an emaciated child standing in a gloomy alleyway or dreary tenement hall, sometimes with a single teardrop streaming out of an eye or an equally undervalued kitten or puppy grasped in their poor hands.  You couldn't help but feel sorry for them.

"Tomorrow Forever" (keaneprints@mikefriedman.com)

The hoity-toity art world considered Keane Big Eyes the epitome of bad taste, but the public loved them.  (One sold for a $100,000, and another, titled "Tomorrow Forever," was chosen for the Hall of Education at the 1964 New York World's Fair.)  By the end of the 1960s, mass-produced prints of Keane Big Eyes, along with knockoffs by other artists--like Bruno Di Maio's harlequin-clad ballerinas, Lee's mod go-go kids, and Gig's puppies and kitties--were snatched up at dime stores and hung in homes by adoring Americans across the nation.  The wide-eye fad also inspired an array of dolls for little girls to nurture, such as Fun World's Suzy Sad Eyes and Hasbro's Little Miss No Name.

Susie Sad Eyes

Little Miss No Name

It's true!  Margaret Keane was commissioned by film actress Joan Crawford to paint a portrait of her in the Big Eyes style.  She placed it proudly in the living room of her Beverly Hills mansion.

"Big Eye Joan"

Below are several of the many Keane prints hanging in the hall of my Kansas City home.  My good friend Jennifer Breck refers to it as "The hallway of the heroin-addicted children!"

©David Mansour