In December 1962, if you were walking around in the Sears and Roebuck store in Oak Brook Illinois, your eagle eyes may have spotted famous actor Vincent Price selling original works of art. You may ask yourself, “How did he get here?” It was his role in Cecil B. DeMille’s recent Biblical epic The Ten Commandments which was what basically brought Sears and Price together. Immediately after the movie’s release in 1956, the producers of a television game show called “The $64,000 Challenge” invited Price and another of the movie’s co-stars, the veteran film actor Edward G. Robinson, to participate in a special multi-part celebrity edition of the program dealing exclusively with art and art history.
Both Price and Robinson were known to be avid art collectors. For six consecutive Sundays, an audience of between thirty-five and fifty-five million people tuned in. Both the program and its viewers were a measure of the growing public interest in art in the 1950s. The New York Times said that what was really exciting about the show was that an “unbelievably vast audience inescapably learned that art is something significant and enriching, and that enjoyment of it is within everyone’s reach.” In the heyday of Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Willie Mays, art was shown to be “something no more remote than baseball.”
Now that the public was well-aware of Price’s role as an art expert, Sears believed that he could be the man to help the company bring original but affordable art to the American public. The retail giant commissioned him as a buyer, and he traveled throughout the United States, England, and France buying hundreds of original pieces of art by artists ranging from the unknown to the immortal.
At the Oak Brook Sears, Price talked and joked with customers, signed autographs, and dispensed brief explanations about art to anyone with a question. Business Week magazine said there was a sprinkling of fur stoles and posh three-piece suits in attendance, but for the most part leather jackets and casual coats dominated the audience—“the trappings of Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia.” One customer explained that although he didn’t trust the big city art galleries, he trusted Sears. For that reason, he was now becoming an art collector.
By the time Sears stopped carrying fine art in 1971, it had sold more than 50,000 original art works.
Let’s try to put this in some broader context next time.