Many Splendid Things

Chuck Close Sol LeWitt James Siena John Chamberlain Pablo Picasso Mark Rothko Richard Tuttle Richard Long

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Dorothy and Herbert Vogel’s one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is crammed with an impressive array of clutter. The main room is full of boxes, crates and piles of books that teeter five feet high and eclipse the picture window. Fifteen turtles look out from a series of tanks on one side of this precarious walkway, noisily knocking their heads and shells against the glass. On almost every visible inch of wall, tea towels or tartan blankets hang over picture frames like a series of strange domestic shrouds. Behind the protective coverings, and stored in the stacked boxes, are pieces of one of America’s most priceless collections of contemporary art.

The diminutive inhabitants of this crowded space have lived here all their married life and now rarely leave it. Herb Vogel, who is wearing red Nikes and long shorts the day I meet them, has just turned 86 and stands a hunched four feet seven inches; Dorothy is 13 years younger and two inches taller. She is the dynamo of the pair, loquacious and busy, while he sits back, watchful, in serene contemplation. The Vogels have been collecting voraciously since the early 1960s, and their passion has earned them an unlikely place alongside the Gettys, Rockefellers and Rothschilds in a recent book: James Stourton’s Great Collectors of Our Time. For most of his working life, Herb sorted mail at the central post office in Manhattan; Dorothy was a librarian in Brooklyn Heights. They had no children and chose to live frugally on her salary so that they could spend his on art.

In 1992, after Dorothy retired, the Vogels donated their ever-expanding collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., because they had run out of space for it. "We’re not ones to throw things out," says Dorothy, glancing around, "and we couldn’t fit another toothpick in." According to Chuck Close, a friend of the couple who is represented in their collection, the Vogels had so many pieces under their bed that it rose off the floor.

The museum had no idea of the extent of the Vogels’ hoard. It took three months and five trucks to pack up and remove from their tiny apartment more than 2,500 pieces: important works by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Julian Schnabel and Richard Tuttle, among others. There is a photograph of the couple taken after the removal process; they are holding their cats, smiling, posing against a freshly painted white wall.

However, their tabula rasa was short lived, and the couple soon refilled the apartment. To thank them for their generous bequest, the museum gave them a small annuity, and the Vogels used this, and what was left from their pensions, to buy yet more art, which will also be donated to the National Gallery. They now own more than 4,000 works; they couldn’t stop collecting.

Christo, an artist known for appropriating vast unlikely packages, has called the Vogels "compulsive collectors, almost like alcoholics." Herb admits, "Sometimes you get carried away." The Vogels’ habit is almost a form of art in itself; they live in the spirit of Picasso’s bohemian declaration: "I am the king of ragpickers!"

The Vogels met in 1960, when Herb read an advertisement in the New York Post about a reunion for people who had attended a holiday resort and decided to crash the party. Dorothy was there. "She looked intelligent," he explains in his slow, gravelly voice, before adding diplomatically, "and cute, too." They married a year later and on their honeymoon went to Washington, D.C., where, fittingly, the first place they visited was the National Gallery. It was there, Dorothy tells me, that Herb offered her an initial lesson in art appreciation. "I learned everything from him," she says.

Herb worked the night shift at the post office and, after catching four hours of sleep, spent his days studying art history under Irwin Panofsky at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He also took painting classes there and frequented the legendary Cedar Tavern, where he rubbed shoulders with Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Dorothy, keen to share Herb’s interests, also began making art, and their respective styles reflected their different personalities. "Mine was hard-edged, very hard-edged," Dorothy says, "and his was more expressionist. I think a lot of people liked mine better." They decorated their apartment with their creations.

When they met, Herb already had a small art collection; he had spent his savings on a Picasso lithograph that he says was "more expensive than anything I’ve collected since." Dorothy also had the collector’s bug, but she accumulated postcards, shopping bags and bookmarks. The first artwork they bought together was a small metal sculpture by John Chamberlain that resembled a crushed toy car. Soon there was no space left on the walls for their own amateur efforts, and they decided to devote themselves to collecting.

Everything they owned became a piece of a larger, never-completed jigsaw puzzle. Their preference was for work that was austere and uncompromising. However, their tastes were also molded by practicality. Pop art, then in vogue, was too expensive. "The only thing we could afford was Conceptual or Minimal," Dorothy says, "and we had very few competitors." It seems paradoxical that a couple so at home in all this clutter should be attracted to Minimalism and Conceptualism, art stripped down to its most fundamental features. Herb says that they had two simple rules: "It had to be affordable, and it had to fit into the apartment."

Did the Vogels ever argue about the works they chose? "He was better at collecting works by Lynda Benglis, who is more flamboyant," Dorothy says. "And I seem to have been better at selecting more cerebral works. But he liked what I chose, and I liked what he chose. We rarely had arguments about anything."

A guided tour of their apartment reveals that even the Vogels’ bathroom is replete with artwork. On one wall is Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #65, 1971, a mural completed by Dorothy according to the artist’s elaborate instructions. Opposite the bathroom is a text piece by Lawrence Weiner commenting on the Vogels’ collection: "MANY THINGS PLACED HERE AND THERE/TO FORM A PLACE CAPABLE OF SHELTERING/MANY THINGS PUT HERE AND THERE."

In their collecting heyday, the Vogels spent almost every night at gallery openings discovering new work. They bought straight from the downtown studios of the little-known and impoverished artists who populated SoHo and Tribeca. LeWitt was a big influence on their choices. They met him at the legendary Leo Castelli gallery in 1965 and became fast friends. Until LeWitt died, in 2007, he and Herb spoke by phone every Saturday morning. "We looked up to him not only as an artist but as a collector," Herb says sadly, "and we followed a lot of his ideas."

In Herb and Dorothy, an intimate new documentary about the Vogels by the Japanese filmmaker Megumi Sasaki that is being released June 5, Chuck Close describes the tiny couple as "the mascots of the art world," and he says that artists would offer them knockdown prices "because they were cute and funny and passionate and enthusiastic when no one was interested in what we were doing, but also because they came cash in hand."

A drawing by Will Barnett, whose work the Vogels have collected extensively, depicts the couple looking at an artwork. Herb is shown bending over a canvas, as if sniffing the wet paint. "He points at the art like a hound," the artist Lucio Pozzi has said. "He’s like one of those dogs that digs for truffles, and his eyes become intense." Dorothy would often leave the room while Herb bargained. They refuse to discuss the prices that they paid but acknowledge that "the collection is built upon the generosity of artists." Because of their financial constraints, much of what they own is drawings or preparatory gestures, and as a result the collection, unlike those composed of trophies, illuminates its participating artists’ working methods and offers a history of art behind the scenes.

Christo and his working partner–wife, Jeanne-Claude, remember getting a call from the Vogels and thinking, "Hooray, we’re going to pay the rent!" But when Herb and Dorothy heard the artists’ prices they sighed, "Oh, my God, we came too late." The artists, however, were flattered by the couple’s seriousness and asked the animal-loving Vogels to look after their cat when they left for Colorado to build their monumental Valley Curtain. In exchange, the artists gave the collectors a preparatory collage of the orange dam, the first of many works the Vogels now own by the Christos. The two couples became friends, as the Vogels did with many of the artists they admired. "They treated us like we were artists," Dorothy says of the people they collected. "I think we shared the same sensibility, feeling and approach to art." The artist James Siena describes them as "more like curators than collectors."

The first time that the Vogels made their collection public was in 1975, when they put on a show at the Clocktower Gallery, an influential alternative space that had opened two years earlier in Lower Manhattan. The show featured 40 works by 40 of the artists they collected. Since then, they have been generous in loaning their work to numerous institutions that were less prescient.

The Vogels always thought of themselves as caretakers rather than owners of their collection and, although they’ve kept a few works back to pay for long-term nursing care if needed (two Robert Rymans, for example), they have never sold a work they’ve acquired. "We always made decisions in the light of what was best for the collection," Dorothy says proudly.

Ironically, even the National Gallery doesn’t have room to house the Vogel collection in its entirety, and in accordance with its charter, the museum is not allowed to sell any of it. To solve this problem, curator Ruth Fine suggested a program, "Fifty Works for Fifty States," which will see the works distributed all over the country. Each of the institutions that accepts the donation vows to display the pieces within five years of receiving them.

Herb is largely housebound now and no longer has the energy to visit galleries or artists’ studios. One of the Vogels’ rare trips out is a five-hour taxi ride to Washington twice a year to visit their collection. Their names are carved in stone at the top of a list of benefactors in the building’s airy atrium. "It’s like going to see your children who are at college," says Herb. For once, they are more focused on distributing their collection than on adding to it. As Dorothy says wistfully, "Our collecting days are finally over."

"Many Splendid Things" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.