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Thomas
Kincade:
A Case Study in Kitsch. By Kenneth Baker Critics who deign to comment on the titanically successful painter Thomas Kinkade usually call him a kitschmeister . But his case is not that simple. |
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Kinkade's marketing techniques - selling editioned reproductions online and in devoted galleries around the country -- make it easy to generalize about what he produces. Yet no one ever bears down critically on an individual Kinkade picture. The Chronicle decided this exercise was overdue. Unfortunately, the Thomas Kinkade Gallery in San Francisco did not have an originaI canvas on hand. Autograph works are scarce and pricey, though every image the gallery brokers derives from a Kinkade oil. A high-grade facsimile would have to serve. Sparsely highlighted by an apprentice, it reproduces the surface texture of a Kinkade original titled "The Mountains Declare His Glory." Kinkade's sappiest imagery - the fire-lit gingerbread cottages, the high-spired churches in glades - are just too ripe a target. Half of Kinkade's critics dismiss him because of the false sentiment typical of everything he produces. Those who believe that false feeling in the arts drives out the true can with some justice accuse him of purveying kitsch. For kitsch was once thought to act like cultural kudzu, corrupting the sensibilities of an audience that authentic expression needs to survive. But that notion seems dated now that the high and popular arts, mass and elite audiences, originals and reproductions, even art media themselves, are all mixed up. We cannot tell how far from Kinkade's hand - never mind his heart - a given image of "The Mountains ..." stands. But in this respect, too, Kinkade may merely be an artist of his time, the post-Warhol era. |
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The copy of "The Mountains ..." that I saw mimics landscape painting in the style of William Keith (1839-1911) or Thomas Hill (1829-1908) and attests that a capable realist originally rendered its glowing sky. The technical licks grow more formulaic toward the foreground. The touches of oil paint on the reproduction - which jack up its price - refuse to merge with the image. They cling to the mountain slopes and a few tree trunks as gelatinous afterthoughts. Critics are less likely to knock such cosmetic additions than they are Kinkade's lack of irony, his pretense to partake of the false sentiments he concocts. Kinkade, they say, lays claim to a sincerity impossible in today's cultural climate. "After completing my recent plein air study of 'Yosemite Valley,' " Kinkade writes, " the mountains' majesty refused to leave me. " "When my family wandered through the national park visitor center, I discovered a key to my fantasy - a re-creation of a Miwok Indian village. When I returned to my studio, I began work on 'The Mountains Declare His Glory,' a poetic expression of what I felt in that transforming moment of inspiration. I even added a Miwok Indian Camp along the river as an affirmation that man has his place even in a setting touched by God's glory." Even without his promptings, any viewer can sense the picture's agenda: to stir religious (read Christian) awe and ecological nostalgia . Painting styles such as Keith's realism have their day and then - for reasons we may never fully understand lose their power to embody illuminating responses to our world. It may be, as many contemporary artists argue, that no way of painting can adequately express our consciousness of the world. But Kinkade's use of painting can evoke only a refusal to be conscious of the world we now endure . Granted that Kinkade describes his image as a "fantasy," his use of a Miwok camp as a symbol of human reconciliation to the divine order of nature is especially tasteless. Anyone who would enjoy "The Mountains ..." as Kinkade intended must erase from memory the whole history of continental conquest, or never have had it in the first place. Kinkade's products have a consistent message: that if we want the feeIing of living in a conflict-free world, we can buy it . The cost - as distinct from the price - of this feeling is mere denial of all one's experience of citizenship, of human relations, of historical awareness . 
THOMAS
KINKADE:
A Case Study in Kitsch.
By Kenneth Baker , SF Chronicle Art Critic. DATEBOOK, Feb. 4, 2001. E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com |
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