Feeling Sentimental
One evening last month, Katie and I went to the Phoenix Art Museum for a screening of Art for Everybody, a documentary by Miranda Yousef about the life, work, and legacy of Thomas Kinkade. Here’s part of the official blurb:
You've seen his cozy cottages, idyllic gardens, and welcoming village streets on everything from canvas to commemorative plates. Both celebrated and disparaged for his kitschy signature settings, the "Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade rocketed to popularity in the '90s by marketing himself to American evangelicals and pitting himself against the elite art establishment. Yet beneath the pristine public persona were demons that would drive him to alcoholism, scandal, and death from an overdose in 2012. After his passing, Kinkade's daughters uncovered a trove of unseen, unexpectedly dark paintings, a discovery that launched an investigation into their father's true personality.
Throughout this fascinating film, we hear from art critics who despise Kinkade’s work and from collectors who adore it. Most significantly, we spend considerable time with Kinkade’s daughters and ex-wife, who fully participate in the film despite the painful cost of publicly grappling with the complexity of the man they loved and lost. The “Painter of Light”—a term Kinkade trademarked—was, in truth, no stranger to darkness, a discovery the documentary considers with sensitivity and in depth.
During his lifetime, Kinkade was known as the most financially successful painter of all time. His company boasted that, drawn to Kinkade’s unmistakable vision of “a world without the Fall,” one in twenty homes in the United States owned a print (or two, or two dozen). A tireless marketer and entrepreneur, Kinkade didn’t hide from the fact that his work was denigrated as sappy and sentimental by critics. Instead, he confronted these detractors head-on, decrying mainstream galleries and museums for peddling the grotesque and bizarre.
Through it all, Kinkade’s work kept selling. Christians—evangelicals in particular—couldn’t get enough.
In an essay written shortly after Kinkade’s death in 2012, curator-theologian Dan Siedell (one of the critics interviewed for the film) argues that in giving us “a world without the Fall,” Kinkade in fact deprives us “not only of Easter Sunday, but Holy Saturday, Good Friday, and Christ himself.” He notes the artistic consensus that Kinkade’s work was “harmlessly trite, uninteresting, nostalgic, and sentimental.” But Siedell also puts his finger on something else: “Kinkade’s images prey on his audience’s preconceptions, expectations, and presumptions, restricting rather than broadening or deepening their experience.”
OK, maybe not so harmless after all.
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All of this puts me in mind of Jeremy Begbie’s A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts (Baker Academic). In one provocative chapter, Begbie—a professionally trained musician and professor of theology at Duke Divinity School—turns his attention to the worship music increasingly common in North American churches over the past few decades (a period of time, as it happens, roughly coinciding with the rise and fall of Thomas Kinkade). Begbie describes “the burgeoning of a certain kind of devotional song, often directed to the risen Christ, a direct and unadorned expression of love, with music that is metrically regular, harmonically warm and reassuring, easily accessible, and singable.”
Clearly these comfortable, reassuring songs have their place in worship services, as Begbie himself acknowledges. But it’s not an especially well-rounded diet. When these are the only songs we sing when we come together, our shared sense of the range of what’s valid (and vital) in gathered worship is greatly restricted:
Devotion to Jesus, after all, entails being changed into his likeness by the Spirit—a costly and painful process. It certainly involves discovering the embrace of Jesus’s Father, Abba, but this is the Father we are called to obey as we are loved by him, the Father who judges us just because he loves us, and the Father who at salvation’s critical hour was sensed by his Son as one who can forsake the beloved. If we ignore this wider trinitarian field, we are too easily left with a Jesusology that has ignored Jesus as the incarnate Son of the Father, left no room for the wide range of the Spirit’s ministries, and encouraged us to tug Jesus into the vortex of our self-defined (emotional) need.
Clearly, part of what Begbie is after is a recovery of worship that’s more robustly trinitarian. But he’s also warning us of the deadly serious dangers of unquestioned sentimentalism. He continues:
Most of us have attended services where we were invited to experience through music what Colin Gunton used to call “compulsory joy”—perhaps authentic for some on certain occasions but often disturbingly out of touch with what others have to endure in a world so obviously far from its final joy, the very world Christ came to redeem. Most of us have experienced worship services where music has been deployed as a narcotic, blurring the jagged memories of the day-to-day world, rather than as a means by which the Holy Spirit can engage those memories and begin to heal them.
In his thoughtful consideration of church music, Begbie is saying something akin to Siedell in his comments on the visual art of Thomas Kinkade. Like Siedell, Begbie seizes on the three holiest days of the church year to warn of a “sentimentalism [arising] from a premature grasp for Easter morning, a refusal to follow the three days of Easter as three days in an irreversible sequence of victory over evil.”
Our understanding of beauty will be “purged of sentimentality,” Begbie writes, “only by appropriate attention to these three days, read as an integrated yet differentiated narrative.”
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I’ve always been moved by “The Three Crosses” by Rembrandt van Rijn, that other painter of light. In this work we see Jesus on the cross, a crucified thief on either side. Mary weeps at the foot of the cross, held by John the Evangelist. A motley crue of soldiers and spectators gathers around. But together with our crucified Lord, the “main character” in the etching is arguably the light itself which streams down, piercing the darkness.
Begbie references this artwork in A Peculiar Orthodoxy as one in which the skandalon of the gospel is powerfully illustrated:
The resurrection does not erase the memory of Friday: it confirms the cross as the focused place where the weight of the world’s evil is borne and borne away. This is how God disarms the principalities and powers and triumphs over them (Col. 2:15); this is how God’s idiocy outstrips human wisdom (1 Cor. 1); this is how “it is finished” (John 19:30). The scandal is captured with astonishing power in Rembrandt’s etching “The Three Crosses” (1653), where the divine light beam falling from above does nothing to alleviate the horror but rather renders it all the harsher. Easter does of course throw its light on Friday, but not a soothing glow so much as a white light that exposes the rupture between Creator and creature, the depths to which the human creature has sunk, and the depths to which God’s love is prepared to reach.
The stakes, in other words, couldn’t be higher. Rembrandt gets that, and with his etching needle he tells the truth.
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Look, it’s easy to dunk on Thomas Kinkade and on those who find comfort in his paintings. There are some talking heads in Art for Everybody who do just that, with takedowns delivered for laughs.
But that’s not really what the film, at its core, is about. Nor does it seem to me that director Miranda Yousef is simply out to expose Kinkade as a huckster or a fraud. Rather, in conversation with people who knew and loved him—in all his complexity—this documentary asks probing questions about life, art, faith, and the tricky business of telling the truth about ourselves and our world.
Without giving away the film’s ending, let me just say this: I walked out of the theater wondering if maybe, just maybe, the painter beloved and despised for his refusal to abide a world with the Fall may have had—in his depths—a truer sense of our shared need for redemption after all. And that there in the darkness, he may have caught the faintest glimpse of the light breaking through.
May it be so.