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 Christopher Knight 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.)
