1962 Etcing "The Diners" Signed Frederick?

"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"

 

Are you trying to say that a 100% of the Price's collection was fake? Maybe there were some suspicious pieces but the point is thay Sears sold fine art. Something you did not want to believe.
Fakes are found even among the biggest auction houses and galleries.

 

I get the Grosz connection
Definitely
But German zeitgeist probably didn't figure too prominently into Sears collections (not aspirational enough?)
How interesting to learn what a well-qualified curator Price was!
Thanks for those links, figtree!