Amazon Art v. Sears Roebuck's Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art

Popular -- not fine -- art

Amazon now peddles fine art by name brand artists online.

That reminds me that from 1962-1971, Sears sold art (typically prints) by famous artists, including Rembrandt, under the aegis of the cultured horror movie legend Vincent Price.

The retired Sears executive who taught my Marketing 101 course at UCLA's MBA school in 1980, George Struthers, was the man who signed the horror movie star to the deal. 

Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art 

Sears label

In 1962, ...Sears set out to end this isolation by merchandising art throughout the country, in a presentation from which pictures could be readily purchased to enrich American homes. Vincent Price was approached to take charge of this program. Price, although well-known by the public as an actor, was also known in the international art world as a collector, lecturer, former gallery-owner and connoisseur who spent a dozen years studying art at Yale, the University of London and other art centers abroad. 

Price was given complete authority to acquire any works he considered worthy of selection. He searched throughout the world for fine art to offer through Sears. He bought whole collections and even commissioned artists, including Salvador Dali, to do works specifically for this program. 

At first, the idea of a large merchandising organization, such as Sears, maintaining a serious, top-quality art collection met with skepticism. But the public - and the artists themselves - soon learned that Sears would not compromise with good taste or artistic quality. 

On October 6, 1962, the first exhibit and sale of "The Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art" took place in a Sears store in Denver, Colo. Original works of the great masters - Rembrandt, Chagall, Picasso, Whistler and more - as well as those of the best contemporary artists at the time were offered for sale in this first exhibit and throughout the program's existence. 

Items ranged in selling price from $10 to $3,000. Sears customers could also purchase items on an installment plan for as little as $5 down and $5 a month. 

Each work in the program was guaranteed as an original work of quality, just as Sears offered quality guarantees on its lawnmowers and TVs. The program was an instant success. So many pictures were snatched up the first day that an emergency shipment had to be flown in lest the walls be bare the next day. 

P. 370 of Sears Catalog

The program expanded in the weeks that followed, adding exhibits in 10 additional Sears stores including Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Penn., San Diego, Calif., Evansville, Ind., Madison, Wis., and Oklahoma City, Okla. After the successful exhibition and sale of these first 1,500 pieces, the program was expanded nationwide to all of Sears stores throughout the country, bringing original works of fine art to the American public in unprecedented quantity and quality. 

Works from the collection were also offered for sale through a special catalog in 1963 and 1964. In 1966, the Sears Vincent Price Gallery of Fine Art was opened in Chicago, Ill., providing a mass audience for talented, but less well-known, young artists. The collection also held temporary exhibits in several hundred communities throughout the country and permanent galleries operated in several cities. 

By 1971, when the program ended, more than 50,000 pieces of fine art passed through a constantly changing collection into American homes and offices.

Professor Struthers said Sears had a good run with it, but eventually had to call it off because by the 1970s, the price of the quality of art that Vincent Price was willing to put his name behind had inflated to way out of the range of Sears shoppers.

How authentic were these pieces? In the page from the Sears catalog above, the signed and numbered Picasso lithograph of a bull for $560 seems plausible, but the $800 Picasso oil painting of 12 square feet in a gold leaf frame sounds a little too good to be true if you are expecting Pablo to have personally put every daub of paint on a canvas coming out of his atelier.

Here's Price's daughter's* description of her father's business partnership with Sears. Price said this was his chance to democratize art collecting for the American public by putting to use all the tricks he'd learned over the years to scrimp when buying decent quality art. That attitude seems incredibly foreign to art collecting today, which is dominated by the conspicuous consumption of the ultra-rich with almost everybody else having lost interest in the subject.

Here's the training film Vincent did for Sears salesmen:

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Yeah, I know what you are wondering, but Price had a child by each of his first two wives, and a third wife (no children).