The name Thomas Kinkade was familiar to me, though I’d have had a hard time saying who he was prior to watching this documentary. If you were around during the 90s, you probably saw his paintings in his mall stores or on the cable shopping channels. Known as the “Painter of Light” he was the most famous painter in America at the height of his popularity. His paintings were very kitschy depictions of cottages and gardens that were designed to be sold to the masses, not for the art gallery and museum crowd. And he was wildly successful. His businesses earned millions. His mall shops opened everywhere selling everything from commemorative plate sets to sculptures and jigsaw puzzles, And he even expanded into housing developments! Because he emphasized his Christian values, he had a large and loyal following of evangelicals who thought his work spoke to them and bought multiple pieces of his work.
But he had demons. And when his business empire started falling apart, he turned to drugs and alcohol and died at the age of just 54. But when his family started inventorying the vault of his work, a different man emerged. His critics from the high art world had always dismissed him as an unserious artist. A 2001 article in The New Yorker bSusan Orlean was scathing. She even made a million dollar bet with him that he would never hang in a reputable gallery. But the unknown work he never exhibited demonstrated an artist capable of being hung in galleries alongside some of the biggies and shocked many of his biggest critics including Orlean into silence.
This alter ego artist also brings up a central point that made the film resonate with me: the question of what is art and who gets to decide what is good or bad and who is talented or not. There is also the question of why a man who was talented enough to have broken into the art world that he seemed to aspire to stuck with painting scenes that were considered low art by the very people he wanted to join.
The film cuts back and forth between archival footage of Kinkade in his prime and during his descent, alongside his wife and daughters who are insightful about him in retrospect, and his art critics who are forced to reconsider him after seeing the art he chose not to show. It is a fascinating art documentary and I recommend it to all the high and low art lovers out there,
In limited release now.