Thomas Kinkade Was the World's Biggest Selling Painter. Art for Everybody Asks Why.

Shedding light on the superstar of schmaltz

By Josh Kupecki, Fri., March 10, 2023

It's a lush garden in the full bloom of spring, a hidden bench under a tree revealed by a shaft of sunlight. It's a towering lighthouse above a rocky coast, a bright beacon of guidance and safety. More often than not, it's a rustic cottage nestled in the countryside at twilight, just across that bridge over the babbling brook. That's the world of artist Thomas Kinkade.

“Kinkade did what Andy Warhol wanted to do.” – Miranda Yousef

That world exploded onto the walls of millions of American homes in the early Nineties. This was the pre-internet cable TV heyday, and Kinkade was a superstar artist/entrepreneur on the QVC shopping channel, constantly selling out not only prints of his oil paintings (stretched onto canvas for that added tactile appeal), but just about anything and everything it was possible to place an image on: quilts and coffee mugs, sure, but also plates, ornaments, 3D dioramas, La-Z-Boy recliners, bank cards, furniture and figurines, and for the real connoisseur, a down payment on a house in a Kinkade-inspired subdivision in Northern California. At the apex of his career, Kinkade often bragged that 1 in 20 households had his artwork in it. This is a $100 million enterprise, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This is also being pointedly ignored by art critics, but Kinkade's themes of "Family and God and Country and Beauty" resonated with white, Christian, middle Americans who were getting riled up by Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe, Piss Christ, and National Endowment for the Arts grants. The culture wars? Kinkade shoved himself to the front lines of the early skirmishes.

Putting this in context is acclaimed editor Miranda Yousef's feature debut, Art for Everybody, premiering at the SXSW 2023 Film & TV Festival. It's not just a portrait of Kinkade but of a moment in time that remains startlingly familiar almost 30 years later. "He was this larger-than-life figure, and his story is almost a Greek tragedy," Yousef says. "But [the film] also provided a way in to talk about these big ideas, like what is art? Who gets to decide that? The politicization of taste. How our culture and our politics create each other. It felt relevant in a timeless way."

Comprising interviews with his family, friends, and members of the contemporary art cognoscenti, Art for Everybody follows a classic rise and fall trajectory: poverty and a broken home segueing into an unsatisfying stint as an art student at UC Berkeley, landing on his style – born of the Hudson River School artists of the 19th century – and finding overwhelming success by creating his own brand as the trademarked "Painter of Light" (a title previously held by J.M.W. Turner, who should have had better lawyers), a move Yousef finds incredibly prescient. "Kinkade did what Andy Warhol wanted to do," she says. "He was innovative and ahead of his time in utilizing artistic reproductive technologies of the time to just get his image out there as much as possible. Nowadays, we see all these artist collabs, like Yayoi Kusama doing Louis Vuitton, Tom Sachs making shoes for Nike. The most successful artists have their imagery on credit cards, like Kehinde Wiley and his work for Amex. Kinkade was already doing that."

But, you know, is it art? Yousef laughs. "I'm not entirely sure it matters."