The Abduction of Margaret Keane

The Abduction of Margaret Keane: This is a multi-part essay about art, occult influences, and alien abduction by Gideon Reid. It begins by highlighting a gap in the narrative retellings of Margaret Keane’s life story. The essay proposes two alternative inspirations for her lifelong artistic motif of painting children and adolescents with large, staring eyes, inviting readers to contemplate how, if either hypothesis is true, it would alter their perspective on Keane’s art or their belief in alien abduction

Outside of this main point of contention in their relationship we learn surprisingly little about Margaret and, in this film that celebrates her as an artist, we see hardly any of her art. In one scene we see her hurriedly put away a self-portrait she’d been working on when Walter, like a line-manager at a

Given that Margaret was equally as famous as Walter, yet favoured by art critics, what is missing from Burton’s film is a proper exploration of Margaret’s muse. We come to understand her motivations to paint. In practical terms it was a means by which she supported her family, and she was good at it too. 

The waif’s kitsch repetitiveness created a space absent of intellectual discussion. Walter filled that void with this grand tale of pathos, spinning various versions of this story to journalists about why he painted big eyes: I first started doing this after world war two when I was kind of tramping around France, Germany and the

Let’s reexamine Margaret’s art during hers and Walter’s busiest period, 1957-1964 because we now know there’s no truth to the ‘war-wracked waifs’ tale. Yet, it remains true that her art contained something that resonated with the American public, who bought her images by the millions. Over this period, the Keanes’ became the biggest selling living

As the adobe brick buildings began to return to the dust they were made from, stories about Oahspe and the colony persisted. After the sale of its land in 1907 Oahspe retained support from a small but enthusiastic audience who kept its text alive. Writer Wing Anderson revived the Faithist’s Kosmon organisation in 1932 and incorporated

It is in details like those about Newbrough’s compassion for the poor in America’s cities (seen in part 5) being his motivation to create the Shalam colony that we begin to see an overlap with the rationale for the Keane waifs. After all, the flaws in the war-wracked waifs story were always there to be

Stories about personal contact with alien visitors began to emerge in popular media shortly after 1947 and the first notable UFO sighting from Kenneth Arnold. A forestry worker pilot, he was investigating a downed transport plane when he saw nine objects moving “like a saucer skipping over water” near Mount Rainier, Washington. Misquoted via an

This was the cry from Barney Hill while reliving his supposed abduction experience under hypnosis. The aliens’ large black eyes are their instrument of power over humans. Various abductees tell us how aliens compel them to stare deeply into their eyes causing irresistible hypnotic control, sometimes they feel calmed, sometimes they feel robbed of their

In the decade preceding the 1969 moon landing popular culture was awash with space themes grounded in real scientific endeavour as well as science fiction. Elements of this excitement about humans pushing their boundaries appear in some of Margaret’s paintings, several of which have content and titles that appear to echo the unsettling niche of