Big Eyes

Review by Pamela Zoslov

How do you define art? Is it something that pleases the eye, or must it meet certain aesthetic criteria? The issue is at the center of Tim Burton's BIG EYES, whose subject is the Keane paintings, those iconic pictures of children with outlandishly large, soulful eyes. (There were also dogs, cats, ladies, giraffes and other doe-eyed subjects.) If you were not around in the 1950s and '60s, you might not appreciate how ubiquitous these paintings were. What accounts for their popularity is that they seemed to capture something in the '60s zeitgeist – idealism coupled with despair, the kind of naïve sentiment expressed in a popular “hand-lettered” antiwar poster of the time that read, “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” So great was the demand for the “Big Eye” images that they were widely imitated and sold as posters, greeting cards, stationery and figurines. I recall a pair of framed harlequins, a boy and girl, hanging in my sister's room, and I recently acquired a slightly chipped plastic cat with giant green eyes, marked “Made in Hong Kong.”