Art for Everybody

In the 1990s, Thomas Kinkade, painter of utopian pastoral settings, ornate Christmas country cottages that glow from within, and (peering through it all) pastel magic-hour sunbeams that look an awful lot like the light of God, became the most successful commercial artist of his time; he was like Norman Rockwell, Bob Ross, and Andy Warhol rolled into one. Miranda Yousef’s fascinating documentary is a study of Kinkade’s aesthetic sincerity, his commercial voraciousness, and the dark side he kept under wraps. His art had a cozy splendor that Middle Americans cherished and that the chattering classes dismissed as kitsch. It was more than kitsch, though. Kinkade painted life as an earthly daydream blessed, in a nearly tactile way, by a wholesome higher power. Yet he had to repress part of who he was to do it, and as the film traces his rise and fall, which includes his alcoholic descent and the disturbed private paintings he kept hidden in a vault, it makes his contradictions tantalizing in part because it never fully penetrates them.