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The Guardian
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Art for Everybody review – the dark side of Thomas Kinkade, ‘painter of light'
You won't find the works of Thomas Kinkade lining the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, yet the painter, who died in 2012, is one of the best-selling artists in history and his paintings hang in tens of millions of American households. Kinkade's typical subjects – rustic landscapes, sleepy cottages, quaint gazebos – bask in an idyllic calm, a luminous callback to a fabled simpler past. Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef's engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled 'painter of light'. Through interviews with family members, close collaborators and critics, as well as Kinkade's own words, the film traces his meteoric success in the 1980s and 90s. Shunned by the art world, he marketed his works through home-shopping television channels and a network of franchise stores to a ravenous fanbase. The Kinkade name became a brand and his pictures were plastered on to collectible plates, cookie jars and mugs. At its peak, his empire generated more than $100m a year. Kinkade proclaimed that his art was for everybody. In reality, his paintings appealed to a specific demographic of white, conservative and largely Christian Americans. Yousef's film does touch on the ideological nature of his work – how it stands in stark contrast to, for example, the subversive art of Robert Mapplethorpe and other contemporaries – though it could have merited more in-depth insight and contextualisation. Yousef's access to Kinkade's private archive, however, is revelatory. Once tucked away in a vault, these secret canvases are haunted by tortured figures and somber landscapes, cast in subdued hues of brown, black and burgundy. Together they reflect Kinkade's struggles with depression and addiction. Here is a visual portal to a hidden side of a controversial artist – one that is not for sale. Art for Everybody is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 13 June.
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- 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
- Entertainment
- 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.
BBC News
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Banal and hollow': Why the quaint paintings of Thomas Kinkade divided the US
Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks. Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than $100m a year. And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC. "It is schmaltzy pastiches of Disney-style woodland scenes, complete with cutesy animals and fairy tale cottages. They are… like the images you find on cheap greetings cards – sugary and forgettable." And compared to some critics, Mullins is being polite. These critics don't just consider Kinkade's paintings to be nauseatingly sickly, they detect something disturbing and ominous about them. In her 2003 book on California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion summed up his art by saying. "It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." As harsh as that sounds, Didion may have been more perceptive than she realised. Art for Everybody, a new documentary directed by Miranda Yousef, shows that the man who called himself the "Painter of Light" did indeed have a dark side. "His branding was so effective that you didn't know there was this really complicated and I would say tortured artist behind it all," Yousef tells the BBC. "He lived a Greek tragedy of a life." The documentary features audio tapes recorded by Kinkade when he was a long-haired, bohemian-looking art student in California in the 1970s – and even then, he was already fretting over the question of whether he could make an impact as an artist while making a decent living. After a stint in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated feature film, Fire and Ice, he concentrated on idealised, nostalgic American landscapes, and he and his wife Nanette sold reproductions of them outside a local grocer's shop. In the 1990s, he took the idealism and the nostalgia to new heights, and swapped his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes that a Hobbit might deem a bit on the twee side. Old-fashioned lampposts and cottage windows glowed. Streams twinkled beneath slender stone footbridges. Bushes burst with pastel flowers. And cash registers rang. Kinkade didn't sell the paintings themselves, but the hazy idylls they depicted were soon being printed on collectible plates advertised in newspapers and magazines. For many Americans, they were comforting refuges from the modern world. In Art for Everybody, Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, is contemptuous of Kinkade's imagery. "It's a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea," he says. "The colour is juiced and the light coming from inside those cottages is intense and blaring." Just as importantly, as far as his critics were concerned, Kinkade's pictures had nothing to them beyond their superficial decorative qualities. "They are banal and hollow, with no intent to say anything meaningful," says Mullins. "Today we would think they had been produced by AI – designed as if by algorithm to a certain formula." But Yousef insists that Kinkade's skill can't be discounted. "There were actually other people who were painting cottages and Christmas scenes and putting them on plates and all that stuff," she notes, "and the thing is that Kinkade's were so much better. His works just blew everybody else's out of the water." She also believes that Kinkade's paintings, rather than being wholly market-led, were linked to his childhood in Placerville, California, where he was raised by his single mother and only intermittently saw his violent father. "It's a common criticism that his cottages look like they're on fire on the inside. And then you learn that it was because when he was growing up it was always cold and dark in the house when he got home, because they didn't have the money to keep the heat and the lights on. He was painting the thing that he wanted." Kinkade's deprived upbringing, says Yousef, didn't just inspire his choice of subject matter, but drove him to make as much money as he could. He and his business partners printed pictures on an industrial scale, as well as putting his immediately recognisable imagery on furniture and ornaments, and selling them on the QVC shopping network. They also set up hundreds of faux olde worlde Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries in shopping malls around the US, and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand. Again, Yousef doesn't see Kinkade as entirely calculating. Having grown up in a house with no pictures on the walls, "He sincerely believed that art should be accessible to everyone." Behind the fantasy Whatever you thought of the paintings, the mass-marketing of the work of a single artist was certainly groundbreaking. In interviews at the time, Kinkade asserted that he was no different from an author selling stacks of novels or a musician selling CDs. He even declared that by industrialising his output, he was doing what Andy Warhol had always dreamt of. But Mullins argues that Kinkade was being "obfuscatory and disingenuous" by churning out reproductions by the thousand, paying his assistants to add a few dabs of paint here and there, and then selling these prints for thousands of dollars, as if they were rare and precious works of art. "Prints offer an affordable way of buying art by great artists," she says. "They retain their value through the limited nature of the edition. This was never Kinkade's strategy." Still, this sort of disagreement between Kinkade and his critics was one of his selling points. Art for Everybody features news reports and promotional videos, in which he tells adoring audiences that his art could be understood and appreciated by everyone, whereas only the snooty elite could see anything artistic about Chris Ofili putting elephant dung on his canvases, or Tracey Emin presenting her unmade bed to gallery-goers. "This is not legitimate art," he proclaimed. As much a televangelist as a painter, Kinkade was a born-again Christian who assured his devotees that buying his work put them on the right side of a political and spiritual line separating them from decadent metropolitan tastemakers. He trademarked the sobriquet "Painter of Light", not just because of all the sunlit clouds and fiery cottages in his pictures, but to signify that he was a force for virtue and Christianity. "The art world is a world of darkness today," he thundered. He, in contrast, was "someone who stands up for family and God and country and beauty". A doughy, plaid shirt-wearing fellow with a thick moustache, he often appeared on television with his blonde wife and his four blonde daughters: the embodiment of wholesome, traditional, all-American values. His fans weren't just paying for his pictures; they were paying to associate themselves with this proudly conservative persona. But that persona, like the pictures themselves, was more a fantasy that Kinkade wished for than an accurate representation of reality. He was prone to swearing after the directors of his mawkishvideos called "cut". He relied on alcohol to cope with work pressures. And, in the documentary, his daughters say that they were encouraged to smile in videos and personal appearances, but often felt as if their father cared more about his career than about them. "Thomas Kinkade and his persona and his brand really cast an extraordinarily long, dark shadow over his entire family," says Yousef, "and there was a lot wrapped up in perpetuating the brand and preserving it." More like this:• The surprising story of Van Gogh's guardian angel• Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece• Eight images that tell the story of America In order to maintain this brand and the vast business empire that went with it, Kinkade had to present himself as a Christian paragon, and he had to complete a stylistically identical painting every month. That meant that he had to suppress other, more conflicted parts of his psyche. The strain became too much. In the mid-2000s, Kinkade fell out with his business partners, and had legal battles with gallery franchisees. He reinvented himself as a womanising, hard-drinking hellraiser. After some interventions by his friends and family, some time in rehab, and the collapse of his marriage, he died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and diazepam at the age of 54. It was only after his death that his family sorted through the vault containing his artwork, and uncovered a stash of bleak, violent drawings and paintings that seemed to express his inner rage and fear in a way that his cottage paintings never could: a shack in the middle of nowhere on a murky night; a nun pointing a gun at herself; giant monsters and distorted faces. Art for Everybody raises the questions of whether these pictures are more authentic than the ones the public knew about. Do they express how Kinkade really felt about his difficult upbringing and his frightening father? Would it have been healthier for him to explore the shadowy netherworlds in these pictures instead of shutting himself inside his stifling sylvan cottages, year after year? And were his critics right to say that his famous paintings were disturbing all along? "One of the things that was obvious early on," says Yousef, "was that his fans had a two-dimensional view of him and his critics had another completely different two-dimensional view of him. I knew there was a three-dimensional person in there somewhere, and that's what I wanted to try to find." In some ways, Kinkade was ahead of his time. First, he was a culture warrior before culture wars were being fought as fiercely as they are now. As someone who claimed that he was taking a stand for Christianity and patriotism and against the intellectual elite, he was staking out territory occupied by more and more in the US today. He was also ahead of his time as an artist with such a brazen commercial side. "Today we're seeing all these artist collabs," says Yousef. "There's Yayoi Kusama who's working with Louis Vuitton, and Tom Sachs is working with Nike, and Kehinde Wiley is doing a collab with American Express, whereas you see in the movie an MBNA bank card with a Thomas Kinkade painting on it. He was already doing it 20 or 30 years ago." Finally, by calling himself the Painter of Light, and by trading on his pious family-man persona, Kinkade turned himself into a kind of product. "Look at where we are today with social media, and everybody being a brand," says Yousef. "He was really ahead of his time with that. But I think that one of the big questions of the film is, what are the costs of turning yourself into a brand?" In Kinkade's case, the costs were unbearably high. Art for Everybody is released on 28 March in the US. --
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
