Part 7 – Overlap Between the Newbrough Myth and Keane’s Rationale

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 seen, but perhaps like the emperor’s new clothes no one was willing to shout out the truth. That the waifs were a creation of Walter is an absurd mismatch between cloying sentimentality and his shameless self-promotion. That they represented poverty was also dubious because they appear simply, but well dressed, elegantly poised, neatly coiffed, and with unblemished skin. They are children who appear completely untainted by war, in fact they seem to occupy a space outside of such matters. Keane’s waifs more closely resemble privileged orphans in an experimental commune than children behaving “like rats running around”.

And of course we know that story isn’t true because Margaret painted the waifs. 

What seems a more likely match between artist and subject matter is that she had encountered, and been touched by the story of these Shalam orphans and it inspired her art. 

But, there are more than newspaper reports and comparable stories to support this hypothesis. 

As well as containing many interesting and bizarre illustrations, the 1891 second edition Oahspe, published in the year of Newbrough’s death, and seven years into the effort at Shalam, contains several new plates including photographic portraits of ten of the colony’s orphans. 

Other than images of hauntingly empty buildings that appeared in newspaper reports, it is one of few pieces of photographic evidence about the colony that exist. It brings to life the reality of the situation there. In it we see the actual faces of infants who, it was sincerely believed, would be the first of a new race of human beings. They were given new names such as Thale, Pathodices, Whaga and Hi’ata, names derived from the strange language of Oahspe. It is a photo of wonder and fascination to those picking up a copy of the text, not least, because of the dramatic irony that we now know those efforts failed. 

It raises so many questions for anyone arriving at this page in the book. What was life like for you in the colony? What did you do when the colony failed? How do you feel about it? Are you still in touch with your “siblings”? Where are you now? 

Did Margaret Keane hold a copy of Oahspe in her hand open at this page, and ask these same questions? 

Instead of the war-wracked waifs of Europe was the inspiration for the waifs that she painted actually from much closer to home, a tragic episode from America’s West?

There are only a small number of other images of the colony that appeared in the media. The New York Journal and Advertiser was a daily newspaper from the Hearst family. It was adorned with colourful dramatic illustrations and exquisite draughtsmanship. Its pages covered the wonders and oddities of the world. 

Of the Shalam colony an 1897 full page article by writer Edgar Saltus asks Can Sin, Sorrow and Suffering be Banished?¹ It contains an illustration of the Shalam orphans which offers details about their condition and the manner of their dress. In an era where pen and ink illustrations were often used in place of photographs (this illustration is actually described as “a photograph”), it contains another neat parallel with one of Keanes’ earliest paintings titled The Waif.

Captioned “A boy who will be brought to manhood in absolute innocence” it shows an infant in Victorian dress with dark shoes and trousers, and a light coloured smock. His hair is cut to a neat fringe and he stands confidently. His hand delicately holds the string to what appears to be a toy animal on wheels. 

The Waif (circa 1960) is one of the first waif paintings to be mass produced by the Keanes. It is of a young girl in black shoes and tights and a simple dress. She stands on grey steps. In the shadows to her right a black cat appears to be following her. In typical Keane style her eyes are oversized, their large irises reflect highlights off her bright yellow dress. 

An uncanny similarity or simply a coincidence? We should also ask why Margaret Keane titled a painting of an infant child in a white smock and bonnet, The Orphan, 1972.

It’s been noted that Margaret was a meticulous researcher. Perhaps an indirect clue that Margaret had researched the Shalam colony story can be found in an 1897 newspaper article³ in the St Louis Globe Democrat that contains an illustration of the Shalam orphans that is curiously similar in its composition to the family portrait of Jerry Lewis that Margaret Keane would paint in 1962. 

The orphan figures are arranged around an adult who is seated. Children stand behind her shoulder, kneel by her feet, and one orphan boy lays head-in-hands on the right-hand foreground. 

Similarly Jerry Lewis is seated. One of his sons is by his shoulder, one is kneeling by his feet and a third is laying head-in-hands on the right-hand foreground. The diamond shapes of the orphans’s collars are echoed in the harlequin patterned suits Margaret paints on Jerry and two of his sons.

More coincidence? Or do these similarities show that Margaret Keane had discovered the story of the Shalam colony and seen these same images and, intentionally or unintentionally, incorporated their visual cues into her art? 

There are even curious parallels between how the Keanes’ talk about their art and Newbrough’s channelled text.

For example this passage from Walter Keane’s 1964 artbook where in keeping with his grandiose style of self-promotion, he reaches for a profound way to describe his artistic method. About his 1963 “masterpiece” Tomorrow Forever, he writes:

So electric was the creative force that even the brush seemed a thing alive in my hand, more a partner than a tool..and now, as the brush fell to with a fervor, child after child materialised, until they seemed to be walking over the curve of the earth toward me. They appeared so quickly I watched in amazement, as if I were only a medium through which this was happening and some unseen force – or was it the brush?- were guiding my hand.

Walter Keane

We’re reminded here of another claim made by Wing Anderson, booster of the Newbrough mythology, that Newbrough painted ambidextrously and by automatic control. A similar unseen force to what Walter describes above guided his hands to produce paintings of religious prophets.

Yet again there is something familiar about these portraits that Newbrough produced. One in particular, KA’YU, includes a disembodied eye that floats in space above the prophet’s head and which could just as easily have been in one of Margaret Keane’s paintings. There is a visual similarity between their simplicity of form and figure, and they contain a motif of fainter almost ghostly faces adjacent to the main subject, a motif that is also seen in several of Margaret’s paintings, two paintings both titledTransition, 1962, Timeless, 1966, and Silent Journey, 1967. 

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Before we explore further connections between Oahspe and Keane’s art, we should pause to acknowledge something critical to this study that emerged into popular consciousness beginning in the 1950s. Something that developed parallel to the Keanes’ most successful period from 1957 to 1964 and that took on a distinctly new character two decades later in the 1980s and 1990s. It has overlapping associations with both Oahspe and Keane’s art: the alleged anomalous phenomenon of alien abduction.

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Summary

• Newbrough’s ideas about the children of the colony mirror Walter Keane’s rationale for his (Margaret’s) waif paintings
• The second edition Oahspe contains a compelling photographs of ten of the Shalam orphans
• The Keane waifs have a remarkable similarity with these photographs and other depictions of the Shalam colony orphans hinting that she may have used these same images as a reference
• Margaret Keane’s paintings have stylistic similarities with Newbrough’s paintings

Continue to Part 8 – Alien Abduction

Footnotes

1. Can Sin, Sorrow and Suffering be Banished? New York Journal and Advertiser, 5 December 1897
2. In his 1964 book Walter Keane, Walter claims authorship with a date of 1948 as a way to show that he was painting “big eyed waifs” long before he even met Margaret in 1955. Margaret most likely painted it around 1960.
   
3. The Shalam Colony, A Queer Spiritualist Community in Southern New Mexico, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 5 September 1897