Herb & Dorothy Liked What They Liked

Herb and Dorothy Vogel collected Minimalist art well before it was in vogue. They gave their collection, worth millions, to the National Gallery of Art.

I saw a wonderful little documentary last week called “Herb and Dorothy” at a local theater. The film was about the lives of a long-married couple who built one of the most important contemporary art collections in history. And they did it on a librarian’s salary. Starting in the 1960s, Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, began collecting Minimalist and Conceptual art from the young artists who pioneered these schools; very few people were paying attention to these schools of art at that time. Both the artists and the collectors had very few means.

But Herb and Dorthy saw great beauty in the stark creations of the artists. They spent all of Herb’s salary to purchase art they liked, and lived on Dorothy’s paycheck. Their collecting was guided by the following: the piece had to be affordable, it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, and they simply had to like it.  Amazingly, most of the artists they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned; they included Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, and many others.

In 1992, the Vogels gifted their entire collection – 2,000 pieces - to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Although the collection today is worth millions of dollars, the Vogels never sold a single piece. Herb and Dorothy still live in the same rent-stabilized apartment in New York with aquariums of turtles and fish, and one cat. 

Megumi Sasaki, the film’s creator and director, was at the  showing and took audience questions. Several in the audience spoke up to analyze the Vogels’ sense of esthetics. A few people felt strongly that the Vogels bought certain angular pieces because the pieces looked like the mail-sorting equipment at Herb’s job (which was presented in one scene).

Sasaki said she learned very early that Herb and Dorothy simply collected what they liked. In the four years she followed them for the film, and in the years of articles written about their collecting, they never analyzed the pieces they bought. They either liked something, or they didn’t.

The purity of their love of art made me think of how true fans of music do not need to break down and analyze what they like, but simply let it into their lives. Take a look at Chuck’s post today about the James Taylor DVD that moved him so much. He showed me snippets of it at a recent lesson. He wanted me to listen to the interplay of the piano and guitar. It was gorgeous. I asked Chuck to write in his post what struck him about this music, and he had no words other than, basically, to say: the performance was moving, and he liked it.

Richard Tuttle, one of the artists interviewed in “Herb and Dorothy,” spoke of the Vogels’ laser-like focus on what they liked; he said something to the effect of this: ‘They were the only collectors I ever met whose eyes were connected directly to their souls.’ What a wonderful way to view art, music, and the world at large.