Thomas Kinkade, known as the 'painter of light,' made millions through his sentimental art, favored by evangelical Christians in the 1990s. Despite his commercial success, critics like Christopher Knight view his work as lacking artistic merit. Susan Orlean, however, describes Kinkade as a performance artist, suggesting his entire brand was a grand artistic statement. Recently uncovered artworks reveal a vastly different side of Kinkade, including self-portraits and abstract pieces that contrast sharply with his public persona, surprising many and adding new complexity to his legacy.
"Thomas Kinkade had a quite outsize cultural impact with really bad art," says the Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight in a new documentary film about the painter. "I mean, really, really, really bad art."
The writer Susan Orlean, who profiled the self-styled 'painter of light' for The New Yorker in 2001, has a slightly more nuanced take. "Thomas Kinkade was a performance artist," she says, calling his pious Christian persona and multimillion-dollar empire of prints and souvenirs of all kinds 'perhaps the greatest performance art piece we've seen in our lifetime.'
Known for his schmaltzy images of cottages in verdant meadows overlooking bubbling brooks, Kinkade made works that were ubiquitous in the US in the 1990s.
Inside are thousands of dark self-portraits, loving depictions of friends and family, Impressionist-style cityscapes, shadowy alleys, skies on fire and even surrealistic abstractions.
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