A new documentary continues the Thomas Kinkade art hustle
'This is where I'm putting my retirement money,' says a woman in a brief but infuriating scene from the new documentary 'Art for Everybody,' about the life and downfall of the enormously popular kitsch artist Thomas Kinkade. She is standing at a table groaning with reproductions of Kinkade's trademark images, such as quaint cottages and homey cabins nestled in landscapes of cotton-candy pink and robin's-egg blue, with golden sunsets or silvery moonlight glinting on clear, placid waters.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Los Angeles Times
In the documentary ‘Art for Everybody,' the dark side of a ‘Painter of Light' is exposed
If you think you've never seen a painting by Thomas Kinkade, think again. The late artist, who is said to have sold more canvases than any painter in history, created a cottage industry (pun intended) of ubiquitous, mass-produced art with his blissful landscapes, idyllic street scenes and cozy cottage tableaus. But the beatific, charismatic painter, who developed a rock-star following, was not all that he seemed. Miranda Yousef, in her feature directing debut, deftly takes on Kinkade's timely and intriguing story in the documentary 'Art for Everybody,' an absorbing, smartly assembled portrait of the mega rise and tragic fall of the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like artist. Kinkade's enormous 1990s-era success, which saw his work reproduced on everything from collectible plates to La-Z-Boy loungers, dovetailed with the period's culture war against the sexualization of art. The born-again Kinkade stepped into that breach, doubled down on the family values bit and became known as a creator of images that the Christian community, among other groups, could embrace. But how much of this was opportunism and how much was true belief? Yousef, who also edited the film, vividly dissects the artist's complicated life with the help of strong archival and personal footage as well as candid interviews with family members, colleagues and a solid array of art-world figures. She first tracks Kinkade from his impoverished Placerville, Calif., youth to his late-1970s days as a bohemian art student at UC Berkeley and Pasadena's ArtCenter College of Design, followed by his work as a background artist for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated fantasy 'Fire and Ice.' (Bakshi, now 86, enthuses here about Kinkade's talent and work ethic.) Kinkade's nascent pieces were often dark and provocative. But it was his move into painting — specifically his signature bucolic pastels with their near-heavenly lighted windows and skies — that would lead him and business partner Ken Raasch to create an art empire that, at its peak, reportedly brought in more than $100 million in annual sales. Kinkade's eponymous mall stores and QVC appearances were among his many lucrative outlets. He was dubbed the 'Painter of Light,' even though British artist J.M.W. Turner first claimed that title in the early 1800s. But from a sheer artistic point of view, was Kinkade's work any good? Or was it simply middlebrow kitsch? Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, who offers several unvarnished opinions here, asserts that Kinkade 'had a quite outsized cultural impact with really bad art.' Of his famed cottage paintings, Knight calls them 'a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea. That cottage is where the Wicked Witch lives… I'm not going in there.' Journalist and author Susan Orlean ('The Orchid Thief'), who profiled Kinkade for a 2001 New Yorker article that lends this documentary its title, considers his output 'very sentimental, a little garish and kind of twee,' despite its admittedly broad appeal. Yet Kinkade, often seen in the film's clips as confident and ebullient with a kind of evangelist's fervor, pushes back against the naysayers by contending, 'All great art is not about art — all great art is about life.' And he took that belief to the bank, literally. But it's recent interviews with Kinkade's wife, Nanette (they married in 1982), and their four millennial daughters — Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett — that provide the doc's emotional heft and shed valuable light on the tumultuous man behind the serene paintings. Yousef masterfully carries us along from the women's happier memories of Kinkade as a devoted family man to someone whose work and fame began to supplant the needs of his wife and kids. His family says he could be 'manic' and 'hard to connect with' and, from a few behind-the-scenes clips of Kinkade at promotional events, he seemed to treat his then-small daughters like props for the cameras. In addition, the artist comes off as smarmy and contentious at times, belying his 'holy man' persona and populist vibe. From around 2006 to 2010, a series of major business downturns, including a bankruptcy filing and several key lawsuits, led Kinkade into a downward spiral of troubling public behavior and substance abuse. (Footage showing Kinkade's compulsive need for booze is unsettling.) His family, angry and fearful, even staged an intervention to force the former teetotaler into rehab. Though he reluctantly went, the therapy didn't take. He died in 2012, at age 54, from an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium. Ultimately, the centerpiece of the film is the Kinkade daughters' posthumous discovery of a vault that houses a trove of their father's unseen, artistically challenging work, much of which shows an underside that few people knew — or could have ever imagined. The women's reexamination of their complex dad's demons and flaws, vis-à-vis these unearthed creations, proves illuminating and poignant. Among the doc's other interview subjects are former Times investigative reporter Kim Christensen, who wrote several articles about Kinkade's legal troubles, which included art gallery fraud; Kinkade's college girlfriend, who recalls his sometimes hostile, dualistic nature; and artist Jeffrey Vallance, who curated the only major survey exhibition of Kinkade's work, held in 2004 at Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center.
Washington Post
03-04-2025
- Washington Post
A new documentary continues the Thomas Kinkade art hustle
'This is where I'm putting my retirement money,' says a woman in a brief but infuriating scene from the new documentary 'Art for Everybody,' about the life and downfall of the enormously popular kitsch artist Thomas Kinkade. She is standing at a table groaning with reproductions of Kinkade's trademark images, such as quaint cottages and homey cabins nestled in landscapes of cotton-candy pink and robin's-egg blue, with golden sunsets or silvery moonlight glinting on clear, placid waters.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- New York Times
‘Art for Everybody' Review: The Hidden Life of the ‘Painter of Light'
One of my high school jobs was stocking shelves and tending the register in a Christian bookstore in upstate New York. 'Bookstore' is a bit of a misnomer: while we did sell books — Bibles, relationship manuals about love languages, 'Left Behind' novels — most of the store's floor space was devoted to things that were not books at all: Christian music CDs and cassette tapes, plus 'gift' items, usually displayed in themed zones: baptisms, amusements and brands like Willow Tree, Precious Moments and Veggie Tales. When I was there in 2001, our biggest sellers came from one section in the store that was set up to resemble a small living room, with a couch and a rug and a wall hanging. This was the Thomas Kinkade section, named for the artist who created the images of colorful homes nestled into sweet landscapes that were then painted and embroidered and printed onto anything a typical Christian bookstore patron might desire. You could buy Thomas Kinkade collectible plates, Thomas Kinkade throw blankets, Thomas Kinkade lamps, Thomas Kinkade crosses, Thomas Kinkade mass-produced cross-stitched Bible covers. With the flick of a button, Thomas Kinkade framed prints would convert images of glowing windows to actual glowing windows via little embedded lights. You could deck your whole life out in Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade, who turned out these original images and called himself the 'Painter of Light,' is the subject of the new documentary 'Art for Everybody,' directed by Miranda Yousef. Kinkade is sort of the Kenny G of American art, ubiquitous and beloved and very easy to deride. The documentary brings in a variety of art critics, journalists and historians to do just that, with reactions ranging from sniffs to an earnest consternation over what Kinkade's anodyne, even retrograde images signify about their buyers. The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, who profiled Kinkade in 2001, provides some background from a decidedly outsider perspective: she hadn't heard of Kinkade in his '80s and '90s heyday, and found him to be as much of an oddity as a cultural phenomenon. But I suspect Orlean is an outlier, and not just because according to the documentary, at one point one in every 20 American households purportedly purchased 'a Kinkade' — meaning a licensed print — to put on the wall, and possibly many more. For those who grew up in and around Christian culture in the United States, especially the evangelical flavor, he was ubiquitous from the 1980s onward, present in church lobbies and grandma's living room. As the art critic Blake Gopnik notes in the film, Kinkade 'fed on the disdain' of critics and the establishment, positioning himself as diametrically opposed to an art world seen as degenerate and anti-family during the 1980s and '90s culture wars. Kinkade served up a vision of a perfect, beautiful world, with himself as a defender (as he says in archival video) of 'family and God and country and beauty.' All of this was very lucrative for Kinkade, who was a marketing genius — one interviewee suggests Warhol might have been jealous — and an outspokenly religious family man. But that makes his death in 2012, at the age of 54, even more startling. After a precipitous decline owing to mounting alcoholism and including public urination, heckling and erratic behavior (plus a failed stint in rehab), Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose. It was easy to write this off as an example of hypocrisy on his part, just another outwardly upright man who kept his real life secret until it burst out of him. But 'Art for Everybody' — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters. Kinkade, they say, was a vibrant and multifaceted man who was forced, partly by his own fame, into showing only one facet of himself in his art: the glowing, bucolic, faith-and-family side. For instance, at various points in the '90s Kinkade's images appeared on the cover of the magazine published by the conservative evangelical organization Focus on the Family, headed by the influential culture warrior James Dobson. Kinkade's branded stores were in shopping malls, and he filmed TV shows that showcased his perfect family, loving life and deep devotion to his Christian faith. The real Kinkade was more complex. The most surprising revelation in 'Art for Everybody' is the existence of what his family calls a 'vault' of his work. Only about 600 of 6,000 have been 'published,' as they put it, as part of the Kinkade brand, but in the vault we glimpse thousands of works that would never hang in a Christian bookstore. They show a far more fascinating artist, one who experiments with forms and styles and frequently depicts the darkness that lurked inside of him. In several images, dark brooding figures rendered in charcoal seem haunted; others feature grotesque caricatures that are bleakly humorous. There's audio tape of him, as a youthful art student, vowing to 'avoid silly and sweet and charming pictures; I want to paint the truth.' Stuffing these impulses down, the film suggests, may explain why he succumbed to addiction. But that art wouldn't have been for everybody, and it couldn't have been marketed to the masses, at least not as work from the 'Painter of Light.' That means that while 'Art for Everybody' unveils plenty about Kinkade's real life versus the fantasy he peddled, it's even more revealing about the nature of art, and what it takes to be financially successful in the mass market. It's not wrong to call Kinkade's art products kitsch: They are sentimental and factory-made, designed to send the viewer into a nostalgic reverie in which critical thinking can simply fade away. The world they represent was distinctly designed for white American Christians who wanted to collect objects that reinforced rather than challenged their faith. (One interviewee notes the conspicuous absence of people of color in Kinkade's cityscapes.) There are questions raised in 'Art for Everybody' that the film lets linger rather than answering directly. What sort of culture requires artists to make themselves brands in order to make a living? The blockbuster success of Kinkade's empire among evangelical Americans is revealing — but of what, exactly? The film prefers to let the audience draw its own conclusions. But it may not be much of a leap to see the glowing windows of Kinkade's cottages and see, as one interviewee does, the blazing flames of a house fire that may burn the whole structure down.
