“Thomas Kinkade had a quite outsize cultural impact with really bad art,” says the Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight in a new documentary film about the painter. “I mean, really, really, really bad art.”
The writer Susan Orlean, who profiled the self-styled “painter of light” for The New Yorker in 2001, has a slightly more nuanced take. “Thomas Kinkade was a performance artist,” she says, calling his pious Christian persona and multimillion-dollar empire of prints and souvenirs of all kinds “perhaps the greatest performance art piece we’ve seen in our lifetime”.
Known for his schmaltzy images of cottages in verdant meadows overlooking bubbling brooks, Kinkade made works that were ubiquitous in the US in the 1990s. He was a favourite among evangelical Christians and suburban moms, who lined up to buy his paintings, prints, commemorative plates, mouse pads, armchairs upholstered with his landscapes and all manner of other products. At Kinkade’s height, one in 20 households in the country owned something with his branded imagery. He even opened a housing development of cottages inspired by his fictional landscapes. With both cheer and bravado, Kinkade himself was all over magazines and television hawking his wares. Shopping malls had whole stores dedicated to his art and tchotchkes.
Little did the public know that Kinkade had a whole vault of works that had nothing to do with cottages and flowery landscapes. Inside are thousands of dark self-portraits, loving depictions of friends and family, Impressionist-style cityscapes, shadowy alleys, skies on fire and even surrealistic abstractions. When the film-maker Miranda Yousef shows the critics images of these pieces towards the end of the new documentary Art for Everybody, they are shocked. Orlean is truly delighted.
Thomas Kinkade’s Untitled (Self-portrait with a Paint Stained Shirt) (around 1979), from his university years, was found in the artist’s vault after his death Photo: Jeff McLane, courtesy the Kinkade Family Foundation
While the question of what is “good” and “bad” art lingers in the background of the film, Kinkade’s aesthetics take a backseat to answering the question of how we can learn to see and empathise with people in all their complexities. Why did Kinkade insist on painting sunshine and rainbows, hiding his true self in a cloak of saccharine nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place?
Yousef has a theory. She points to “two holes in his heart” that Kinkade would attempt to fill his whole life, to no avail. One was due to the abject poverty of his childhood. The small house he grew up in was often dark, as his mother could not afford to pay the electric bill; this is why he painted idyllic cottages with all the lights on and worked tirelessly to make as much money as possible. The other was his need to be loved by all—the result of an abusive and often absent father.
But Kinkade did not start out as an aspirational Norman Rockwell-Walt Disney hybrid. “I want to avoid painting silly and sweet pictures, charming pictures, happy pictures,” he says in an audio recording he made as a teenager, when he was thinking about skipping college and moving straight to New York City. “I want to paint the truth, and the truth of this world is not happiness. The truth of this world is pain, and that’s the only truth.”
Kinkade attended art school at the University of California, Berkeley, but he found it hard to fit in—perhaps partially because of his background. (He did not know what a real hamburger was until he got there, Yousef says, as his mom would mix the meat with oatmeal at home to save money.) Kinkade had a mental breakdown and dropped out, finishing his studies at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He became an evangelical Christian around the same time.
“He was really well-educated about art and art history, which was surprising to me,” Yousef tells The Art Newspaper. “Before the cottages, he was painting large-format westerns. He was extremely influenced by the Hudson River School.” She also notes that Kinkade was “really good at matching styles—his imitation of Norman Rockwell looks like a real Norman Rockwell”.
Thomas Kinkade’s Portofino (2003), an Impressionist-style painting found in the vault Courtesy the Kinkade Family Foundation
Yousef says she did not understand “how skillful a painter Kinkade was” before starting the film project. She points out that many other people were putting images of cottages on commemorative plates in the 1990s, “but they were terrible. His skill blew them out of the water. And now his style has become the archetype.”
Kinkade was also prolific. He created a new intricately detailed cottage painting every month, in addition to running his empire of prints and collectibles. He was one of the first people to make himself into a brand. “Andy Warhol would’ve respected his marketing genius,” Yousef says.
Warhol’s name comes up often in the documentary, and it is no accident that two experts on the Pop artist are interviewed in the film—the former Andy Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner and the critic and Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. As Kinkade once said, “I’ve achieved the Nirvana that Andy Warhol dreamed of achieving. Warhol’s dream was that he would become a robot who just could push a button and his paintings would come out without him even being involved, and I’ve done that!” The performance artist reveals himself. Even Kinkade’s own family calls him one.
Amazingly, the artist’s wife, all four of his kids and his two siblings participated in the film, in addition to some of his closest friends and a couple of colourful superfans. They provided not only insightful interviews but archival images, home movies, boxes of fan letters, Kinkade’s teenage audio recordings and the all-important access to his vault. Yousef says that it was particularly important for her to give voice to his immediate family, who were often overshadowed by Kinkade’s public persona and success.
Still from Art for Everybody, showing Kinkade painting one of his signature cottages en plein air
Towards the beginning of the film, each of Kinkade’s children holds up a painting that their father made especially for them in his traditional style. In a touching bookend, towards the end, they each choose a favourite previously unknown work of his from the vault. “Almost ten years after he died, the family was ready to talk,” Yousef says. One of his kids, Windsor Kinkade, is now an artist.
Kinkade’s life began to spiral in the early 2000s. Once a teetotaller, he had become an alcoholic. His drinking eventually led to the implosion of his personal and professional life. His wife left with the kids. He unscrupulously fired his business partner, one of his oldest and closest friends. The business crashed. There were lawsuits against him and his company. He died in 2012 of an overdose of alcohol and Valium. He was 54.
“His images killed him,” says the art historian and theologian Daniel A. Siedell towards the end of Art for Everybody, concluding that Kinkade’s bucolic scenes were oppressive, leaving no room for grace or redemption. Art critics had long seen Kinkade’s work as pernicious and unsettling, but perhaps they had not considered how this affected the artist himself in his quest to thumb his nose at the “legitimate” art world and create what he saw as a more accessible art for the common man.
“The one thing I want people to take away from the film is the importance of treating others with compassion and nuance,” Yousef says. “We’re all complex people, and we absolutely have to rehumanise each other. It’s the only way we can move forward as a society.”
Watch the trailer for Art for Everybody:
- Art for Everybody has upcoming screenings at theatres in New York City, Santa Fe, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere
