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How a Working-Class Couple Amassed a Priceless Art Collection | Mental Floss http://mentalfloss.com/article/48844/how-working-class-couple-amassed-priceless-art-collection#.V...

1 of 10 2015-06-25 23:53

IMAGE CREDIT: NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, GALLERY ARCHIVES

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By Jed Lipinski

Herb Vogel never earned more than $23,000 a year. Born and raised in Harlem, Vogel

worked for the post office in Manhattan. He spent nearly 50 years living in a 450-square-foot

one-bedroom apartment with his wife, Dorothy, a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public

Library. They lived frugally. They didnt travel. They ate TV dinners. Aside from a menagerie

of pets, Herb and Dorothy had just one indulgence: art. But their passion for collecting

turned them into unlikely celebrities, working-class heroes in a world of Manhattan elites.

While their coworkers had no idea, the press noticed. The New York Times labeled the

Vogels the In Couple of New York City. They counted minimalist masters Richard Tuttle

and Donald Judd among their close friends. And in just four decades, they assembled one

of the most important private art collections of the 20th century, stocking their tiny

apartment floor-to-ceiling with Chuck Close sketches, paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, and

sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy. Today, more than 1,000 of the works they purchased are

housed in the National Gallery, a collection a curator there calls literally priceless. J.

Carter Brown, the museums former director, referred to the collection as a work of art in

itself.

The Vogels had no formal training in art collecting. They didnt aspire to open a gallery or

work in museums. They bought art the way any amateur collector shops: for the love of the

individual pieces and the thrill of a good deal. But you dont accumulate a priceless

collection of anything by accident. Herb and Dorothy developed a methodical system for

scouting, assessing, and purchasing art. When it came to mastering their hobby, the Vogels

were self-trained professionals. This is how they did it.

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THE ART OF BUYING

Herbert Vogel was born in 1922, the son of a tailor and a homemaker. A rebellious teen, fond

of jazz and zoot suits, he dropped out of high school because I hated people telling me

what to do, he said. Instead, he worked in a cigar factory before doing a stint in the National

Guard. When a dislocated shoulder resulted in a medical discharge, he enrolled in art

history seminars at New York Universitys Institute of Fine Arts, where legendary art historians

like Erwin Panofsky and Walter Friedlaender held court. In the evenings, Herb frequented

the storied Cedar Tavern, listening in awe as artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline

roared at each other over the meaning of abstract expressionism. He decided he wanted to

be a painter. To subsidize his new passion, he landed a job at the post office, working the

graveyard shift in the dead-letter department.

In November 1960, Herb, then 38, went to a dance at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Manhattan.

Scanning the crowd, his eyes fell on a pretty, bookish young woman 13 years his junior. This

was Dorothy Faye Hoffman, the daughter of a stationery merchant from Elmira, N.Y. Dorothy

had moved to Brooklyn two years earlier, after receiving her masters in library science at the

University of Denver. Herb thought she looked intelligent. Dorothy found him cuddly and

liked his dance moves. It was love at first sight.

Herb and Dorothy were married in 1962 and spent their honeymoon in Washington, D.C,

where they made their inaugural voyage to the National Gallery. Thats where Herb gave me

my first art lesson, Dorothy said. At the time, she knew next to nothing about art, having

always preferred music and theater. But her husbands enthusiasm inspired her. She

enrolled with him in painting and drawing classes at NYU. That same year, they bought a

small sculpture made from crushed car metal by the artist John Chamberlain. They had no

idea that the joint purchase would be the first of thousands.

The Vogels rented a tiny studio in Union Square, painting there at night and on weekends

and using the vibrant, abstract products to decorate their new apartment on 86th Street. But

by the mid-1960s, the couple realized that their artistic ambitions outweighed their abilities.

I wasnt bad, Dorothy claimed, adding, I didnt like Herbys paintings. Herb, an

unfailingly modest man, admitted as much: I was a terrible painter. They decided to

concentrate on collecting instead.

At the time, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism were in vogue and too expensive for the

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3 of 10 2015-06-25 23:53

Vogels. Minimal and conceptual art, on the other hand, had yet to be embraced by the art

world establishment. The Vogels made a pact: Her salary would go toward living expenses,

his toward art. Under these new terms, they visited the SoHo studio of an obscure artist

named Sol LeWitt and walked out with the first piece LeWitt ever sold: an untitled, golden,

T-shaped structure. He had more than average potential, and I felt it, Herb said. LeWitt

would later become a titan of contemporary American art.

But Herb and Dorothys obsession was just starting to kick in. The couple began visiting

dozens of galleries and studios each week, becoming what artist Chuck Close called the

mascots of the art world. In making purchases, they functioned as a team. Herb, the

impulsive Dionysian, searched for art like a truffle hound, said the artist Lucio Pozzi, who

has more than 400 works in the Vogel collection. Dorothy, the Apollonian librarian with the

encyclopedic memory, was more passive, hanging back and calculating the financial

realities. They had only a few criteria: The work had to be affordable; it had to fit in their

apartment; and it had be transportable via taxi or subway. Not part of the equation? The

artists reputation. We bought what we liked, Dorothy said. Simple as that. And they

continued to lead their double liferacing from studio to studio to gallivant with artists and

to scout their next big purchase every night, while keeping their passions private from their

work colleagues. Still, assembling such an incredible collection on such a tiny budget

required a few other tricks.

WORK OF ART

Many in the art world call the Vogels method cheating. Thats because the couple never

dealt with galleries and art dealers. Instead, Herb and Dorothy negotiated with hungry

artists directly, arriving at studios with cash in hand. Artist Jeanne-Claude, who passed

away in 2009, remembered receiving a phone call from Herb back in 1971, when the

creators of The Gates were still broke. Its the Vogels! Jeanne-Claude cried to her

dispirited husband and partner in art, Christo. Were going to pay the rent! But the Vogels

didnt just take their cash to big-name artists; they were equally passionate about unknown

talents, often helping them to develop. David Reed, now a famous conceptual artist, said

the couple encouraged him to make more drawings, which later became a central part of his

practice. The Vogels made you aware of what you were doing as an artist, he said. They

had artist sensibilities. When they spotted something beyond their means, theyd find a

way to make the purchase: Theyd buy on credit; theyd forgo a vacation; theyd even throw

in cat-sitting to sweeten a deal. And the artists loved them for it. As Chuck Close told

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4 of 10 2015-06-25 23:53

Newsday, You knew when you were selling them something it was becoming part of an

important collection.

It wasnt long before the artwork overtook their home. By all accounts, the 450-square-foot

apartment on East 86th Street was more of a storage facility than a place to live. The Vogels

collection gradually replaced all their furniture save the kitchen table, some chairs, a

bureau, and the bed, which concealed dozens of drawings by Richard Tuttle and Lynda

Benglis. Visitors cracked their heads on clay Steve Keister sculptures hung from the ceiling

and discovered typographic texts by Lawrence Weiner on the bathroom wall. And while they

stashed the pieces wherever they could, Dorothy has repeatedly tried to squelch one

persistent rumor: The Vogels never stored art in their oven.

Herbanddorothy.com/Fine Line Media Inc.

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It wasnt just the masterpieces that were crammed into the space; the Vogels shared their

storehouse with 20 turtles, eight cats and an aquarium filled with exotic fish. To protect the

artwork from kitten claws and rogue turtles, the couple boxed and wrapped the pieces not

hung on the walls, further diminishing the available living space. Art is Herbys only

interest, except for animals, Dorothy once said. (Fittingly, they named their cats after

artists, like Matisse, Renoir, and Manet.) When National Gallery curator Jack Cowart first

saw their apartment, he was stunned. It upset all of my alarm systems as a curator, he

said. I began to think: What if theres a fire? What if one of the mega-gallon fish tanks that

Herb keeps his fish in springs a leak?

By the mid-1970s, the Vogels were famousat least in New York City. The Clocktower

Gallery, run by Alanna Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, staged the first

exhibition of the Vogels collection in April 1975. The opening coincided with a profile in

New York magazine called A New Art-World Legend: Good-by, Bob & Ethel; Hullo, Dorothy

and Herb! The title referred to Bob and Ethel Scull, a vulgar taxi magnate and his Vogue

model wife. After a messy divorce, their entire collection of Pop Art and Abstract

Expressionist was auctioned off for an eye-popping $10 million. The Vogels, by contrast,

never sold a thing. We could easily have become millionaires, Herb told the Associated

Press. We could have sold things and lived in Nice and still had some left over. But we

werent concerned about that aspect.

Pozzi offered an alternate explanation. To ask them to sell a piece of their collection would

be like asking me to cut off a square yard of one of my paintings, he said. They were

artists, and the collection was their work of art.

Herb retired from the post office in 1979 and, naturally, used his pension to continue buying

art. But the increasing size of the collection threatened to overwhelm the Vogels, like

hoarders crushed to death by towering stacks of The New York Times. In the 1980s, they

were forced to admit that their apartment could no longer contain their beloved art. They

began meeting with curators and evaluating their options. They knew they wanted to donate

their collection instead of selling it, and they liked the National Gallery, which is free to the

public and maintains a policy against deaccessioning objects, meaning the collection

would never be sold. In 1990, the year Dorothy retired, the Vogels followed through on their

promise: Art handlers from the National Gallery transferred an astonishing 2,400 works from

the Vogels tiny apartment, in a move that required five 40-foot trucks. In fact, unloading the

works from the trucks and into the gallery tied up the museums freight elevators for weeks!

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February 14, 2013 - 11:40pm

Realizing that the Vogels hadnt invested for their future, Jack Cowart, the museums

curator of 20th-century art at the time, paid the Vogels a small annuity in exchange for their

generous donation. But instead of saving the money for medical expenses or splurging on a

better retirement, the Vogels couldnt help themselves: They immediately started collecting

more art. The annuity helped the couple purchase another 1,500 or so items. As Dorothy put

it: If we wanted to make money, we would have invested it in the stock market. This led the

grateful if overburdened institution to create the Fifty Works for Fifty States program, in

which 50 museums across America will receive 50 pieces from the Vogels collection.

In 2008, Herb and Dorothy, a documentary about the couple directed by Megumi Sasaki,

was released to rave reviews. Sasaki, a former field producer for Japanese public television,

had met the Vogels years before while filming a series about Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I

couldnt believe it was a true story, that such people exist, she recalled.

It wasnt until 2009, when Herbs health began to fail, that the Vogels ceased collecting. It

was something we did together, and when Herb was too ill to enjoy it, we stopped, Dorothy

said with typical matter-of-factness. Herb died in July 2012, at the age of 89. Dorothy's job

now, she says, is to make sure people dont forget the collection she and her husband built,

which is considered not just the most impressive art collection to have been housed in a tiny

apartment, but one of the most important art collections of the 20th century. I have no

regrets, Dorothy said. Ive had a wonderful life. And I believe Herb and I were made to be

together.

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.

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53 Comments

mdu527 What a great story ! They led such unassuming but interesting lives while helping somany yet unknown artists along the way. How nice that they were together for so longdoing something they truly enjoyed. And how nice that their collection, a piece of art initself, now " belongs" to the public where it can be seen and appreciated by everyoneinstead of scattered among private collections limited to only a privileged few.

MarkW99 Just about the time I've gone over the edge and become a confirmed misanthrope, Iread something like this. THANK YOU Herb and Dorothy for helping keep humanityalive. On life support, but alive.

Jeff That is so funny that "Many in the art world called the Vogels' method 'cheating.'" Whattheir method actually was, was not something that art dealers and museum curatorswere capable of: buying what they liked, and buying it cheap (well, considerably cheaperthan a gallery would pay). Curators and gallery owners were subject to the arbitrarywhims of vacuous critics who 'declared' what was good. Therefore, the only thing biggallery owners could do is insult them. It's a classic 'tortoise vs. the hare' metaphoricalexplanation.This was an awesome story. I'm glad to have learned it.

apsutter Yup. They had good instincts and taste so they were able to get out ahead of the


9 of 10 2015-06-25 23:53

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