Gregory Wolfe on Thomas Kinkade and sentimentality

I’ve avoided, to a large degree, commentary regarding painter-slash-marketer Thomas Kinkade, and the couple times I have mentioned him I tried to maintain the utmost professional decorum. He and his work easily give rise to polarized passions for and against. My personal observation is that — while I grant the artist liberty to depict any subject matter he chooses — the saccharin nature of his works supplant or bury whatever ills he’s suffered or observed in life (this based on reading articles about and interviews with the man). The artist’s personality will always come out in his or her works.

It surprised me last night to see that Gregory Wolfe included an essay talking about Kinkade in his Intruding Upon the Timeless collection, and I was eager to read it. Jumping off of the common criticisms of The Painter of Light, Wolfe’s commentary considers the artist’s seeming love affair with sentimentality. Critics go so far as to call Kinkade’s work “art as a Happy Meal” and “cultural Prozac.” At the same time, Wolfe concedes that the paintings must be meeting a felt need in the culture judging by their popularity.

Wolfe defines sentimentality using R.H. Blyth: “We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it” and Oscar Wilde: “A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” He goes on to use Mark Jefferson’s characterization of sentimentality not as inherent in certain emotions, but instead as a disjuncture between emotion and object. “The heart of the problem is that of a misrepresentation of the world in order to indulge certain emotional states,” Wolfe says. “The essence of Kinkade’s sentimentality is the packaging of nostalgia. It’s an oxymoronic idea, but it has become a major part of our cultural life, as Florence King has noted: ‘True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories . . . but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted deja vu.’”

He concludes the essay thus:

“There are times when criticizing sentimentality seems like overkill. But it would be wrong to simply dismiss the phenomenon — and the specific instance I’ve been discussing, religious kitsch — as nothing more than examples of harmless mediocrity. The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: ‘There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.’

Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love. But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia. And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion. Unless compassion means the act of suffering with the other in their otherness, it becomes meaningless. Well-intentioned as the purveyors and consumers of sentiment may be, they still want the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

I haven’t personally thought of the marketing guru’s impressionistic works as utopian before, but the word seems appropriate to me now. Kinkade describes his paintings as depicting a “world without the Fall.” As a child I regularly created — in my mind and on paper — such worlds without sin. While bored in high school math class, I devised islands where only Christians were allowed to live, combining (probably) the sense of isolation I was beginning to feel in the church with my fledgling interest in architecture and community planning. In retrospect, I realize these ghettos I dreamt of fly in the face of Christ’s mandates to make disciples of all nations and bear potentially frightening similarities to historically heinous circumstances such as the Nazi concentration camps.

All that to say that as I continue to think about Kinkade and his work, I may be able to more aptly understand where he’s coming from.

What really irks me about the artist is his ceaseless marketing, his dependency on reproductions — no matter how high their quality or how many dots of “light” are applied — and insistence on plastering his paintings on everything from mugs to, apparently, recliners. The man is more of a brand than an artist. It seems as though this is how he wants it, but it makes it very difficult to take him seriously as an artist. And by artist here I mean someone deeply interested in his craft as a vehicle for imaginative and probing communication. The paradox is that his model is all about mass communication. While I don’t understand, personally, the world of artistic reproductions, I have no significant problem allowing a painter or printmaker their limited edition giclees. Kinkade, however, takes this to an astronomical new level, paying no respect (it would seem) to the original, the tactile.

I wonder how Norman Rockwell was perceived in his day, or even Maxfield Parish (one of my favorite illustrators). Perhaps if we think of Kinkade as an illustrator, his wildly successful and ubiquitous marketing endeavors will seem less offensive.

What Kinkade’s paintings lack that Rockwell’s and Parish’s often rely on are images of people. Wolfe, in his essay, points out that Thomas Kinkade’s “genius” is that he never lets us into the “Cotswoldy cottages” that are his staple, “leaving us free to imagine the world within.” But that’s another topic for another time.