Publisher Description
Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.
When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane—the credited artist of the weepy waifs—for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.
Parfrey's story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. Director Tim Burton made a movie about the Keanes called Big Eyes, which came out in 2014.
Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey's original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details.
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“This stunning investigative report pulls back the
curtain of maudlin decorative kitsch to reveal the hedonistic and depraved
stylings of a true American mountebank.”
—
Frank Kozik, renowned graphic artist
About the Authors
Adam
Parfrey is the editor of Apocalypse Culture, Apocalypse
Culture II, It’s a Man’s World, and coeditor of Sin-a-Rama.
He is the coauthor of Ritual America:
Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society, The Secret Source: The
Law of Attraction and Its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages, and Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life
of Darby Crash and The Germs. Adam also wrote the compilation Cult Rapture, which contained his early
feature article on the crazy Keane story.
Cletus
Nelson is a contributor to books published by Process
Media, the Disinformation Company, and Creation Press.
About Bronson Pinchot
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.