What They Did for Love: A Modest Couple's Grand Art Collection

The Vogels at The Gates installation in 2005 at Central Park in New York City. Still from 'Herb and Dorothy,' a documentary film by Megumi Sasaki.

When Dorothy Vogel first met her husband, Herbert, at a dance in New York City, she was a librarian from Elmira, N.Y, who knew nothing about art. Herb, a high school dropout with a keen eye and a predilection for abstract expressionism, took her to the National Gallery of Art in Washington on their honeymoon.

“I learned from looking at art itself,” says Dorothy, now 73, who accompanied Herb to museums, galleries and artists’ studios. Starting in 1962, and using only Herb’s modest salary as a postal clerk (they lived on Dorothy's pay), the couple amassed an extraordinary collection of 4,000 contemporary artworks—all now destined for museums.

The Vogels’ unlikely collecting career is nearing its end—Herb, 86, is frail and needs a wheelchair and Dorothy doesn’t like to leave him—but the couple’s accomplishments are very much in the spotlight these days.

They are chronicled in Megumi Sasaki’s award-winning documentary Herb and Dorothy, which opens this summer at the Beekman Theatre and Cinema Village in New York City on June 5 and later at Landmark Theatres in major U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif. (June 19); Washington, D.C., (July 3); and Los Angeles and Boston (July 10).

Last November, the couple returned to the National Gallery to celebrate their newest project: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. Aided by the National Gallery, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Vogels are donating 2,500 artworks by 177 artists to museums around the country, one in each state.

The innovative project, featuring artists such as Sol LeWitt, Richard Tuttle and Robert Mangold, includes a catalog and a website that keep the artworks together even as they are dispersed. The idea was “to make each grouping be as close to a mini-overview of the collection as possible,” says Ruth Fine, the National Gallery’s curator of special projects in modern art.

The Vogel collection, legendary in art circles, is best known for its holdings in minimalism and conceptual art. That was Dorothy’s taste. “I like the simplicity, the beautiful colors,” she says. Herb remained partial to the abstract expressionists. The Vogels, once aspiring artists themselves, chose drawings and modest-size pieces that other collectors disdained. As Herb and Dorothy tell it, their tastes were prescient, and they often bought artists, such as LeWitt, before they became celebrated and prices escalated.

“We didn’t have to answer to anybody,” Dorothy says. “We didn’t have a board. We would buy what we liked, what we could afford, and, we always said, what would fit into our apartment.”

By 1990, though, their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment was crammed with acquisitions, filling the bathroom, hanging from the ceiling, stuffed under the bed. Even the rug was art. Herb and Dorothy, the documentary, reenacts the removal of the collection (which took five large moving vans) to the National Gallery. The Vogels donated or promised 1,100 works to the museum, accepting only a small annuity in return.

Then, says Dorothy, they banked the annuity and, using Herb’s pension, kept right on collecting.

Filmmaker Sasaki says she first met the Vogels in 2004 at a New York reception for the husband-and-wife artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The collectors made an immediate impression. “They were so beautiful,” Sasaki says. “They were very small, but their presence is amazing, their energy.”

Sasaki’s documentary, which follows the Vogels into artists’ studios and includes reverent commentary by a number of their artist friends, became “a story of their love affair—with art and artists and each other.”

Six months into the project, Sasaki says she felt blocked by her inability to coax more art analysis from the Vogels. She says the artist Lucio Pozzi broke the logjam by telling her, in effect: “That’s why Herb and Dorothy are so unique and special. They just look and look and look. They don’t care how you talk about art. They are seeing something.”

Steve Keister, a New York-based sculptor and ceramicist whose work is part of the "50/50" project, first met the Vogels in the mid-1970s while working at the sales desk at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Encouraged by their appreciation of Richard Tuttle, whose paintings influenced his abstract sculptures, Keister invited the Vogels to his studio.

“They were interested in what I was doing,” says Keister, “but the truth is, I was disappointed because they didn’t buy something on the first visit.” On the other hand, “when my work did start to catch on, and had exhibitions, they were quick to come back and buy a lot of things.”

The Vogels liked to collect in depth. And they were loyal. “When other people stopped collecting,” Keister says, “they kept going.” Over time, both he and his wife, sculptor Jill Levine, became close friends of the couple. “I think we consider each other family,” Keister says.

Unlike most collectors, the Vogels were able to bypass galleries and buy directly from artists, often at deep discounts. “They knew we appreciated what they were doing,” says Dorothy. “We took the time to understand it with them. Then other artists wanted to be part of it. They understood that our resources were limited, so they made it affordable.”

When the Vogels began giving their collection away, she says, “they realized our intentions were honorable. We didn’t do it to make money because we never sold anything.”

The documentary gently illuminates their improbable tale, without making it seem any less miraculous. “There aren’t that many librarians and postal workers who collect art at all—certainly, on such a scale,” says Fine. “They devoted their life to their collection, they gave up traveling, they lived on her salary, so they would have more money to spend on their art. The collection really was the centerpiece of their life.”

“We never made any sacrifices,” Dorothy says. “Because we did what we wanted to do.”

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.