Thirteen years after his death from an overdose of alcohol and valium, the American painter Thomas Kinkade’s brand lives on. The original Thomas Kinkade store in Carmel, California, still operates, and the official Kinkade Instagram account has a tidy, if modest, 67,000 followers. A recent partnership with Disney features, among other things, a 16-month calendar showing some of the Disney empire’s best-known faces in fantastical landscapes.
Still, this is but a shadow of the massive, multimedia Kinkade operation that reportedly netted over $2bn in total retail sales in 2004, licensing its images to everything from plates to calendars to greeting cards to actual Thomas Kinkade cottages that fans could live in. If you happened to be a sentient human being during the 1990s and 2000s, chances are you have at least some cultural memory of this artist who was as ubiquitous as could be. (Kinkade was fond of bragging that he reached the heights of everywhereness that Andy Warhol could only dream of.)
The veteran film editor Miranda Yousef’s first feature, Art for Everybody, attempts to document Kinkade’s startling rise to fame and ultimate fall, examining the artist from as many angles as possible. “One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,” she told me in a video interview. “You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.”
Yousef was drawn to Kinkade’s story for being what she termed “a modern-day Greek tragedy” as well as for how it engaged numerous questions vital to the tastemaking cultural battlefields – among them, what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand. She felt determined to fully flesh out this person who she knew from her teenage years and who had largely become flattened by the media coverage of his life. “I grew up in Massachusetts, and Kinkade was in the malls, he was in the ether, he was just everywhere,” Yousef told me. “I knew there was more to this story because this person had this whole collection of unseen works that was completely different than what we knew of him. I knew there was a 3D person in there somewhere.”
Arguably Kinkade’s most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the “Painter of Light” moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.)
But there was a dark side to his success – he was an alcoholic, was accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment, and even lost a $3m court case to Thomas Kinkade gallery operators for defrauding them. In giving so much of himself up to his personal brand, Kinkade did not exorcise his personal demons but rather made them stronger. “The film is about how denying yourself full self-expression will destroy you,” Yousef said. “Kinkade is almost a textbook definition of that. He built this empire around this personal brand, but it was almost a gilded cage, and he couldn’t keep up.”
And, as Yousef points out in Art for Everybody, the art that Kinkade made was decidedly white and heteronormative, bending toward a Christian nationalist nostalgia that may have fed the yearning for an earlier, simpler time that has been exploited by the Maga movement. Yousef explained to me that she tried hard to find people of color to present in Art for Everybody, but was largely unable to do so. “His consumer base was not exclusively white, but it was overwhelmingly white,” she told me.
True to these scandals and the ultimate bankruptcy of his empire, Kinkade has taken a beating in the press, and Yousef views her film as an act of “rehumanizing” the artist. She goes into his backstory, which involves an alternatively abusive and absent father, as well as a childhood home devoid of anything resembling art, so he made his own. In her telling, Kinkade wanted everyone to feel the solace that art brought to him. “He had this need and desire to have art on the walls of his home,” Yousef said. “It’s a universal feeling, he really felt like art should be for everybody, and that was part of his excitement surrounding this whole business idea.”
Yousef also gives plenty of screen time to Kinkade’s fans, who were legion. “We had a van that was filled top to bottom with fan letters,” she told me. “There were all these people reaching out to say ‘your art helped me.’” Art for Everybody features some of these letters directly, including one heartfelt missive that credited Kinkade’s paintings for helping to get over the loss of a sister, and another written by a sibling of a student murdered in the Columbine high school mass shooting who found solace in Kinkade’s work.
These testaments to the millions who felt a special connection to their Thomas Kinkade art are juxtaposed with a number of art critics, including the New Yorker’s Susan Orlean and the Pulitzer prize winner Christopher Knight, who are given plenty of space to knock Kinkade’s contribution to the art world. (Orlean once wrote that she bet the artist $1m that he’d never have a show in a major art museum in his lifetime.) Yousef also gains access to a family vault of art from Kinkade’s pre–Painter of Light era, filled with things that gain the approval of Orlean and Knight in a satisfying third act reveal.
In that way, Art for Everybody makes the implicit argument that you can either make art that will win over the establishment or that will win over the greater population, but you can’t make both – in one telling scene, the successful Kinkade walks through an art school class, dismissing one student after another for making interesting work with no sales potential. Yousef also counterpoints Kinkade’s easy-to-love work with a few controversial pieces of capital-A art, such as Andres Serrano’s infamous photograph Piss Christ, which are compelling and even beautiful in their way, but that completely outrage Kinkade’s Christian fanbase. She believes that moving beyond these kinds of divisive arguments is crucial to the future of American society.
“If there’s one thing I want for people to take away from the film, it’s the importance of viewing others with nuance and compassion,” she said. “I feel like political forces and the social media landscape and all of these things are conspiring to encourage us to dehumanize each other. It’s really important to rehumanize each other, because that’s the only way we’re going to move forward as a society.”
One can’t help but walk away from Art for Everybody feeling that Kinkade built up a billion-dollar empire in a fruitless attempt to satisfy the father that could never approve of him, and that he would have been better off processing all of that trauma through the sort of interesting but largely unsellable artworks that he produced earlier in his life. Instead, he ended up making paintings that hit the same note over and over in a way that is undeniably pleasing and eye-catching, but that feels like taking a hit of chocolate when what you really need is a therapy session.
Art for Everybody does an admirable job of giving Kinkade an enormously fair treatment and interrogating the many questions implicated by his American tragedy. As much as anything, the movie is a cautionary tale to anyone thirsting for fame: be careful what you wish for, it just might end up controlling you. “It was too much, he couldn’t give it up,” Youself told me. “Imagine being like, my business is bringing in $100m per year and everywhere I go are these cheering crowds. That’s not easy for anybody to give up.”
Art for Everybody is playing at New York’s Firehouse Cinema from 28 March with a digital release to follow
