by Joanne O'Sullivan
The key to successful collecting, some say, is to “buy what you love.” New Yorkers Herb and Dorothy Vogel followed that guideline in creating what’s now considered one of the most comprehensive collections of minimalist and conceptualist art in the world. But it’s the story of the couple themselves that continues to capture people’s attention, and they recently became the subject of the documentary film Herb and Dorothy. Directed by Megumi Sasaki, the film will be screened at the Fine Arts Theater in Asheville on October 25 in conjunction with the Asheville Art Museum’s 60th anniversary.
The Vogels seem the unlikeliest of candidates for New York art world stardom: Herb is a retired postal clerk and Dorothy a retired librarian. They are not terribly chic and live in a tiny Manhattan one-bedroom along with several cats, fish, and turtles. But starting shortly after their marriage in 1962, they spent nearly every evening going to gallery openings, every weekend visiting artist’s studios in some of the rougher parts of town, creating relationships with artists who no one then had ever heard of—now some of the biggest names in 20th century American art: Sol LeWitt, Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle among others. The pair lived on Dorothy’s salary and used Herb’s for art, and even did some cat sitting for Christo and Jeanne-Claude in exchange for a piece of work.
Several principles guided their collecting: the work had to be affordable, and small enough to be carried home on the subway and to fit in their apartment. But most importantly, they had to like it.
“They like the most unlikable work, the most difficult, the least decorative,” Close says of the couple in an interview in the film. And despite the conceptual nature of the work and the heady atmosphere in which it’s typically shown, the Vogels, says filmmaker Sasaki, never intellectualize about the work they’re drawn to. “The only thing they said was, “It’s beautiful. I like it.”
In 1992, after amassing over 2,500 pieces, the Vogels essentially donated much their collection to the National Gallery of Art, a place the couple had visited on their honeymoon 30 years earlier. In 2008, the Gallery introduced a new initiative: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a program that gifts a piece from the Vogel’s collection to an institution in each state.
Herb and Dorothy (now 87 and 74 years old respectively) continue to collect, and estimates place the number of pieces in their current collection at around 4,000.
Herb and Dorothy received the Golden Starfish Award for the Best Documentary Film and Audience Award from the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival and the Audience Awards from the 2008 SILVERDOCS Film Festival and the 2009 Philadelphia Cinefest.
Herb and Dorothy screens at the Fine Arts Theater in Asheville, Sunday October 25 at 7pm.
