Terry Redlin, an artist from this farm-and-factory city, knows his lushly cheerful paintings of cottages, sleigh rides, ducks and campfires generate nothing but sniffs from art critics.
Yet he sticks with it, sustained by a love of painting, the support of his family and the tens of millions of dollars that his pictures generate in sales every year.
Familiar or not, Redlin is one of America’s most popular artists, a titan in a small but hugely profitable group: painter-entrepreneurs who have discovered a vast appetite in the American heartland for cozily nostalgic art. Redlin’s art and licensing empire even has a palace. The towering 52,000-square-foot museum he built to house his work is larger than those devoted to Andy Warhol or Georgia O’Keeffe, and has turned this small city into one of the state’s top tourist destinations.
“I was strictly a country kid that loved to hunt,” the 65-year-old artist said, his face pinked by the soft lighting of his $17 million self-financed museum. “I hated school. Now I’ve got a school named after me, would you believe it?”
The success of Redlin and other mass-market painters — including Thomas Kinkade, the California artist with his own publicly traded stock — is at the heart of what Redlin and his fans call an artistic revolution for the Everyman.
“I know a lot of artists wouldn’t have a gallery in a shopping center; it would have to be off to the side, more exclusive. But I paint for people like me,” said Redlin, whose images can be found in galleries, gift shops and occasionally on the QVC shopping channel.
Since 1996, more than a million fans have thronged to Redlin’s sprawling colonnaded museum amid the corn and soybean fields 100 miles north of Sioux Falls. Politicians in the area couldn’t be happier; among their many thank-yous, the Sioux Falls public schools christened the Terry Redlin Elementary School in 1998.
Now, the artist is poised to add another art-related colossus to his corner of South Dakota: A 60,000-square-foot plant in Watertown that Redlin Arts Inc. predicts will be the finest factory ever designed for the manufacture of art.
The factory, set to open in June, will allow Redlin Arts to produce 20 percent more art, according to the painter’s son and business manager, Charles Redlin. The factory will focus on its new “linen line,” which offers prints done on a canvaslike surface for added realism.
Like fellow factory-aided painters, Redlin is best known for his “limited-edition prints,” hand-signed copies printed in batches of up to 10,000, at a price of $275 and up.
His genre, which he calls “romantic realism,” revolves around a sprightly world where fallen snow never grays, every kid catches a fish, and every chimney chugs a perfect plume of white smoke.
$4.1 billion in sales
From its origins in wildlife art in the mid-1960s, the limited-edition business has grown to an estimated $4.1 billion in annual sales, according to Unity Marketing, a Pennsylvania research company that tracks art and collectibles.
The dozen or so big names in the mass-art niche also include Bev Doolittle, who emphasizes Native American themes, and Wyland, the painter who dropped his first name, Robert, when his marine-life art began netting him millions of dollars. Kinkade, the artist whose work is represented by Media Arts Group Inc., a company in San Jose, Calif., last year sold $80.9 million of his paintings, prints and accessories.
Like Kinkade, Redlin sees himself in a tradition of populist artists such as Norman Rockwell. But to art historian Robert Rosenblum, who curated a Rockwell retrospective earlier this year at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, that comparison ignores Rockwell’s uniqueness.
“Rockwell was a brilliant inventive artist, who chronicled America year by year,” Rosenblum said. “But these guys are just turning over the same sugarcoated formula in some kind of Disney world.”
That mainstream critics reject Redlin and his ilk is no surprise to Frank Sisser, publisher of USArt magazine, a Minneapolis-based publication devoted to the limited-edition market. Sisser says their appeal to fans is in their lack of pretense.
“The art establishment is always going to look down on a Terry Redlin because he flies in the face of what they want art to be: original in thought and execution, and elitist. And Redlin is none of that,” Sisser said. “The core of the limited-edition concept was a way to make art affordable and accessible to the masses. And these guys have taken it to another level.”
Redlin, a one-time illustrator and calendar printer, declines to estimate his personal worth, saying only that the privately held company now run by his son has annual revenues well over $20 million.
Tax filings for the non-profit museum foundation list the total value of the building and paintings at more than $30 million.
Museum takes root
Redlin’s originals once sold for as much as $90,000, before Charles Redlin persuaded his father to retain the valuable works for a museum that would draw fans from across the country.
“You’ve got New York, their art market, all that, that’s a whole different thing than the common-person art, you know,” the artist said, strolling through his museum. “Out here, I always say, if you can get a farmer into a gallery, I’d pay you, because it isn’t going to happen. They’re intimidated.”
More Top Picks Best Waffle Maker
In contrast to an austere urban gallery, Redlin’s four-level museum is engineered for friendliness, right down to the wooden railings that offer a comfy perch in front of the canvases. Featuring more than 100 of Redlin’s originals, the museum is free to the public and operated as a non-profit foundation; all gift shop receipts go to the roughly $1 million annual budget.
Redlin calls the museum “a gift to the people of Watertown,” in return for a state art school scholarship he received as a youth. The Redlin Art Center draws more than 200,000 people a year to Watertown — placing the museum on the state’s top-10 list of attractions, a few places behind Mt. Rushmore National Memorial.
Barry Wilfahrt, head of the local chamber of commerce, said the city has not estimated the museum’s economic impact but added: “Redlin has put Watertown on the tourist map, as simple as that.”
Not everyone in town is so delighted with the museum. Local artists wonder why the only work featured at the art center is Redlin’s.
Estranged community
“You go to any community and look up an `art center,’ and it is a center for the arts, not for one person,” said Larry Negaard, a painter and publisher of a local art newsletter. “If this is a gift to the community, why does some of the community feel so estranged?”
Charles Redlin has a ready answer: “Because Terry Redlin paid for the whole thing. If they would like [something different], they might want to consider paying for their own someday.”
To be sure, other artists’ work would not add much appeal for devoted Redlin fans such as Charlie Uldrich of Milligan, Neb., who eagerly journeyed to the museum within two months of its opening.
Uldrich, 56, and his wife, Mary, are so taken with Redlin’s “Evening With Friends” painting that they patterned and named their 400-seat restaurant after it — complete with a dining room featuring a 14-foot-high cabin that seats 16 and is designed to look like the log cabin in the painting.
“If there is ever a man I want to meet, it is Terry Redlin,” Charlie Uldrich said. “They say he is as down to earth as can be.”