Burning Down the House: Why I Love Thomas Kinkade
The name Thomas Kinkade evinces many a grimace and an eye roll, due to the kitsch and cliche found in his formulaic painting. He has achieved virtually zero critical acclaim in the high art world and his work barely achieves any status at all in a basic analysis of recent art history. Yet his work is widely collected, very widely, by many people. Albeit, it is collected by people who make art purchases at the mall. Reproductions of Kinkade’s halcyon scenes of cottages and sunsets are famously estimated to be in one and 20 homes in America. Meanwhile, other artists who mass produce art via an army of assistants (Damian Hirst) or artists who specialize in kitsch (Jeff Koons) are, if not beloved, well regarded in the critical sphere. Andy Warhol made Duchamp’s “readymade” famous with his screen printed reproductions of boxes of grocery store detergent (and assistants created his works). Kinkade was credited to say, “I am the natural heir to Andy Warhol,” and although I can’t find any legitimate reference for this comment the quote seems to be exactly on point. (That comment would imply a certain ironic self-knowledge that Kinkade not normally noted for having, so I doubt it is an accurate attribution.) Critic Jerry Saltz, no fan of Kinkade, commented about his marketing and studio practice that he “was willing to go the full Warhol.”
Kinkade, meanwhile, did certainly say in an interview that he was “the most controversial artist in the world.” I only wish that were true. A deep analysis of Kinkade and his oeuvre, to my knowledge, has yet to be introduced into the established canon of art criticism. No doubt the mall art hoards, bourgeoisie in taste and style, turned the ArtForum editors off a critical pursuit of Kinkade’s strange universe.
Popular tastes may have changed a bit since the heady Kinkade heyday of the 90s, when Kinkade franchises were opening in strip malls everywhere. The esteemed “above the gas fireplace” location for the Kinkade print-on-canvas may now be an indifferent selling point, as the many closings of the Kinkade stores seem to suggest. However many a Kinkade greeting card and tea cozy is still in magnificent abundance in the on-line retail world. Though the artist has lost his life, he has not yet lost his bite.
I was given a book on Thomas Kinkade as a white elephant Christmas present one year. The book had a puffy pleather cover and included a glowing bio (“Thomas’s genius was apparent at an early age”) along with many patriotic quotes and inspirational sayings. As a collage exercise I spent some happy hours deconstructing these Kinkadian visions into my own fragmented explosions and geometrical forms.
The exercise gave me a back door analysis into the Kinkade formula. He is self titled as the Painter of Light (TM), but in order to achieve his dramatic chiaroscuro he employs an extremely heavy hand of black. He basically under-paints every form a dark black-green. The dark mass of bushes become fecund, dripping with fuchsia blossoms of indeterminate genus. Add a misty twilight and receding fences, brooks, and stone pathways. A deer. A gazebo. A sunset.
My initial response to the Kinkade trope is a kind of leering annoyance. How cliché, how tired, how unrelentingly saccharine. After working with the painting reproductions, I began to feel additionally that the works are hiding another, deeper reality that is a bit queasy, a bit teeth grinding. A reality in which something is very wrong. Every garden exists in a fantasy season where every possible flower is asserting itself as if forced to bloom by a hothouse mad scientist. The black undergrowth conceals what? The cloying twee in his work seems ultimately to be a varnish over a disturbing and poisonous environment.
His structures, English tutor cottages, castles and mansions, et all, are generally indeterminate of era and precise geography. Human figures rarely present themselves in the tableau, (though due to Kinkade’s later brand alliance to Disney, Cinderella and Bambi are often on hand). Meanwhile, every window of the cottage affords a flickering warm glow. After an extended viewing of cottage after cottage, the relentless repetition of the glowing windows looks an awful lot like flame. To wit, the houses are a mad inferno, being consumed from the inside.
The veneer of warm feelings, home and gardens, and American prosperity are brought into nauseous duplicity when multiple repetitions of this theater are regurgitated. It’s an absolute flurry of a queasy sweetness, a dark underbelly of a confused time and place, sickening blossoms, a burning house. The staggering truth is that these are the paintings that captured the art print buying public of the American 90s, to the tune of 100s of millions in sales and branding. Kinkade certainly made more of what the people wanted: he was nothing if not have a marketing genius. And this, this! is what America wants? Apparently, America wants paintings with the burning bush, the hidden crosses, the vampire twilight. America wants nostalgic sentimentality thinly veneered over an uncomfortable amalgam of a terrifying fantasy life.
Kinkade died at 54 from a lethal combination of Valium and alcohol. Before and after his death, lawsuits and malpractice allegations swirled around the man and his estate. His wife sued his girlfriend, or vice versa. Knowing his raw end, a sad descent and voluminous scandal to a man who made his most earnest appeal (and his best sales) to the Christian Evangelical set, casts a new “light”, shall we say, on the man’s life and work. His burning houses and shadowy bushes become a gripping autobiography. His brother, who has taken helm of the Kinkade brand since the painter’s death has said, “The tragedy of my brother is he eventually fell to his own humanity. The triumph of my brother is that his art was never touched by that tragedy.” This is of course the exact opposite of what I observe in the collected works of Thomas Kinkade. What’s fascinating to me is that Kinkade, his protagonists, and his public continue to believe he was successfully creating a fantasy untouched by darkness. It’s a shame that his massive popularity and sharp sense for profit has eclipsed a serious institutional attempt at a deeper reading into his collected paintings.
Originally published at www.josielewis.com on April 6, 2016.
