(Miranda Yousef, 2023, USA, 99 minutes)
"If you like Kinkade, you're an asshole."--Ralph Bakshi
I grew up wanting to be an artist. Once I learned how to draw, I drew all the time. It made me happy, and the praise buoyed me when I felt insufficient in other areas. As I moved from grade school to high school, I figured it's what I would do professionally, so I majored in studio art, but shortly after graduating from college, I gave up. Instead of waiting to be rejected as an artist, I rejected myself, and pursued other interests.
Thomas Kinkade also grew up wanting to be an artist, and knew that the odds were stacked against him. In an audio recording made when he was 16, Kinkade admits that he doesn't want to end up like Van Gogh; not appreciated until well after his death. Unlike me, however, he didn't give up.
He could have simply developed a style and settled on a theme, but Kinkade went further by turning it into a lifestyle. Director Miranda Yousef doesn't just look at the paintings, prints, and ancillary products that made him rich, but behind the pious image to reveal what he really thought and the kind of art he really wanted to make, which might suggest an unauthorized documentary, except his family–brother, sister, wife, and four daughters–chose to participate, even though her portrait is troubling at best.
Kinkade turned to art as a refuge from a youth in Placerville, CA he found unsatisfying, since his parents were divorced and had little money. He also thought he was a genius, which makes him sound like a lot of fun to be around. That confidence, though, helped him to get a job working on 1983's Fire and Ice from animator Ralph Bakshi, who marveled at his skill and discipline. He left to strike out on his own.
Kinkade moved on to landscape paintings he sold at local galleries, but he was committed to making art that everyone could afford, so he switched to printmaking. Just as significantly, he traded impressionism for kitsch.
When he met Ken Raasch, who became his business partner, they decided to turn him into a brand. He wasn't just Thomas Kinkade, but the Painter of Light™. It’s like the way Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, was succeeded by Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. Granted, Jackson wasn't what I would call kitsch, but Kinkade set himself up as a successor to 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer, who was known posthumously as the Master of Light, except his work was marked by subtlety and naturalism.
In the film, former Washington Post art critic and Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik cites Turner rather than Vermeer, but Kinkade had little in common with either, though his brother Patrick sees the brightly-lit cottages as an attempt to recreate the childhood he wishes he had. It's like the opposite of the immortal Santana lyric, "My house is dark, and my thoughts are cold."
By the 1990s, Kinkade had gotten his wish, and his art was everywhere.
He was a QVC staple with shops in malls filled with plates, mugs, lamps, candles, pillows, greeting cards, snowglobes, illuminated paintings–you name it.
He could've simply revelled in his success, but then he wouldn't have been Thomas Kinkade. He wanted more. Knowing he'd never have the respect of critics, he positioned himself in opposition to the art they championed. He wasn't just an artist and an entrepreneur, he was a cultural warrior.
Like many cultural warriors, he had a public persona and a private one. To family and friends, the former wasn't fake necessarily. It's just that there were other aspects of his life that weren't as marketable, so he kept them under wraps. He had a storage room, for instance, filled with art that looked nothing like the "sentimental, a little garish, kind of twee" paintings, to quote New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, that became his stock in trade.
Though his wife and daughters come across as intelligent people, they believe the marketing around their patriarch prevented him from being himself in public. I take their point, but it's a part he chose to play. He wasn't a child, and no one forced his hand. His maudlin art and faithful façade combined with the evangelical and conservative figures with whom he appeared in photo ops–including the future 45th and 47th president of the United States–left little room for originality and free expression.
Nor did it leave much room for Kinkade to be the kind of father his wife and daughters wanted and needed, because he was always working. Something was bound to give, and the trouble began when the teetotaler began to drink. Since he had a tendency to do everything to excess, he never should have started, but it was the socially acceptable stress reliever he chose.
By 2001, the bloom was off the rose as he had oversaturated the market. Stores closed, sales declined, and the stock tanked. He could've cut his losses and returned to the more personal paintings with which he began as an art student at Berkeley, but egomaniacs never know when to quit.
Yousef recounts the many ways in which it all went to shit. It's easy to feel a sense of glee, or at least schadenfreude, when karma catches up with an evildoer, except Kinkade was more complicated than that, and throughout the film, she reveals the challenges he spent his life trying to overcome.
The second half of the film isn't as fun as the first, and that isn't her fault. Some heavy drinkers, like Oliver Reed, go out in a blaze of glory--partying with sailors in Malta during the making of Gladiator--but Kinkade comes across as sad and pathetic in his final days. He was free to finally be himself, but it was too late.
I believe this was the right approach in light of the alternatives. Yousef spoke with art critics, curators, and professors, but avoided standup comedians, satirical cartoonists, and others who might have chosen to make fun of Kinkade and his art. She didn't speak with many collectors, but it wasn't really necessary, not least when some of the speakers in the film, like Bakshi and conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, were fans of a kind.
In the end, she finds a touching way to end an unhappy story that doesn't rely on false uplift, but rather genuine appreciation from the insiders who got to know the work–and the man–beyond the brightly-lit cozy cottages.
Art for Everybody, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2023, opens in Los Angeles on Fri, April 18, with Susan Orlean and Jeffrey Vallance in attendance, and expands in the weeks to come. Find more screenings here.
Images: Tremolo Productions (Thomas Kinkade at work), The Art Newspaper via The Kinkade Family Foundation (A Quiet Evening, Places in the Heart I/1998 and Self-Portrait with a Paint Stained Shirt/photo Jeff McLane/approx 1979), Pinterest (Kinkade with The Garden of Prayer/1997).
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