{"id":170004,"date":"2025-06-09T10:28:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T10:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/170004\/"},"modified":"2025-06-09T10:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T10:28:09","slug":"art-for-everybody-review-the-dark-side-of-thomas-kinkade-painter-of-light-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/170004\/","title":{"rendered":"Art for Everybody review \u2013 the dark side of Thomas Kinkade, \u2018painter of light\u2019 | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

You won\u2019t find the works of Thomas Kinkade lining the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, yet the painter, who died in 2012, is one of the best-selling artists in history<\/a> and his paintings hang in tens of millions of American households. Kinkade\u2019s typical subjects \u2013 rustic landscapes, sleepy cottages, quaint gazebos \u2013 bask in an idyllic calm, a luminous callback to a fabled simpler past. Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef\u2019s engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled \u201cpainter of light\u201d.<\/p>\n

Through interviews with family members, close collaborators and critics, as well as Kinkade\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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\u2019s film does touch on the ideological nature of his work \u2013 how it stands in stark contrast to, for example, the subversive art of Robert Mapplethorpe and other contemporaries \u2013 though it could have merited more in-depth insight and contextualisation.<\/p>\n

Yousef\u2019s access to Kinkade\u2019s 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\u2019s struggles with depression and addiction<\/a>. Here is a visual portal to a hidden side of a controversial artist \u2013 one that is not for sale.<\/p>\n

Art<\/a> for Everybody is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 13 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You won\u2019t find the works of Thomas Kinkade lining the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, yet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-170004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114652938536697625","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}