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, isone of the best-selling artists in historyand 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 Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef’s engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled “painter of light”.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’sstruggles with depression and addiction. Here is a visual portal to a hidden side of a controversial artist – one that is not for sale.
Artfor Everybody is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 13 June.