Horror movie legend, St. Louis native donated several works to SLAM

With his unique, mellifluous voice and diabolical laugh, horror movie legend Vincent Price made a name for himself in Hollywood portraying campy villains. What many may not know, though, is the St. Louis native also left his mark on the fine arts world.

Price’s cult following and decadeslong career included more than 100 appearances on stage, television, and radio, and he was in iconic films such as House of Wax (1953), House on Haunted Hill (1959), and The Fly (1958). In 1983 he even had a cameo as the narrator on Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video. He was an inspiration to horror enthusiasts in Hollywood and beyond, but most notably to Tim Burton, who cast Price in Vincent (1982) and Edward Scissorhands (1990).

After graduating from the St. Louis Country Day School (now Mary Institute and Country Day School), Price, who had developed an early love of the arts, went to Yale University, where he studied art history, graduating in 1933. He then attended the Courtauld Institute of Art in London with the intention of studying the fine arts before being bitten by the acting bug. He remained a lifelong advocate and collector of art, though, and took his role as a collector very seriously.

“The moment that you see a work of art, it conjures up all kinds of things: the creative act—who produced it, where it’s from, what the background is, what the artist’s personality is, the times in which it was created. It’s just endless what you can learn from a single work of art. You can fill up the crevices of your life, the cracks of your life, the places where the mortar comes out and falls away—you can fill it up with the love of art,” Price is quoted in Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, written by Victoria Price.

Over the course of his life, Price directed an art gallery, lectured around the world, and spearheaded Sears’s 1962 Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art, a program to make fine art more accessible by selling it for relatively low prices in select Sears stores. Price commissioned artists as well known as Salvador Dalí to create works for the collection.

His impact on the fine art world can also be felt right here at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Five objects in the Museum’s collection that span 1,400 years are courtesy of the beloved actor. Price died in 1993.

In 1948 Price gave the artwork Modern Thought and Catholicism (1902) to the Museum in honor of his parents. Created by French artist Paul Gauguin in the final year of his life, this 91-page manuscript is bound with two boards decorated with transfer drawings and woodcuts portraying religious imagery. It reflects Gauguin’s critiques of the Catholic Church and his opinions on spirituality, relying heavily on spiritualist Gerard Massey’s writings. It was featured in the 2019 exhibition Paul Gauguin: The Art of Invention and has an adjacent digital interactive.

Victoria’s biography of her father made note of the manuscript and quoted her father saying the manuscript was given as a memorial to his “mother’s worrisome apprehension about the Pope wanting to rule the world. I knew this would tickle Mother, while it might have upset Dad—for he and I shared many a snicker over her worries about Catholicism.”

American artist William Gropper’s The Defenders (1937) was donated to the Museum in 1944. Dating to the late 1930s,  The Defenders was created in New York, and Gropper depicted the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) using oil on plywood. The war struck Americans, including Gropper, as an example of the threat of the possible spread of Fascism across the Atlantic Ocean.

A wooden pipe made by an unknown Lakota/Dakota (Sioux) artist titled Pipe Bowl and Stem and a stone sculpture titled Palma joined the collection in 1949 and 1953, respectively. The pipe is made of Great Plains wood, pipestone, and hide, with one end projected to fit into a bowl. Two turtles, a beaver, and a ram’s head are masterfully carved into the body of the art piece. Palma, a sculpture of a male head wearing an elaborate headdress, was created in the late Classic period, 600–909, by an unknown Veracruz artist.