Herb and Dorothy -- The Finest of Fine Art Collectors!

Herb and Dorothy Vogel are perhaps the world's least likely art collectors, a retired postal worker and a retired librarian with one of the world's great collections of conceptual art —and with a story that proves briskly and engagingly cinematic in Megumi Sasaki's documentary Herb and Dorothy. The couple began frequenting New York galleries and art studios in the early '60s; they'd pose questions about work they didn't understand, educating themselves and befriending such then-struggling unknowns as Jeff Koons, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold and Chuck Close. And everywhere they went, they bought art. Their budget was strictly limited — they lived on Dorothy's salary, while devoting Herb's to purchasing paintings — but by showing up with cash in hand, and by showing feverish interest in the new and the unconventional, they managed to ingratiate themselves with the minimalist artists of the day. Minimalism, in fact, was all they could afford. But they went maximal with the minimal, picking up early experimental work for a song; later, they'd buy more mature work at a discount as the artists they'd helped through lean times became more established. Over time, the Vogels became mascots of the New York art world, amassing in their tiny rent-controlled apartment a collection that traced the entire development of the minimalist movement — and of the artists who created it, many of whom would become enormously famous and influential. Lining the walls of the apartment they shared with Herb's fish, turtles and cats, and stacked on shelves and under the bed, the artworks accumulated until the Vogel collection was indisputably one of the world's most impressive. So much so that museums began vying to acquire it. Filmmaker Megumi Sasaki started documenting the Vogels just as they were considering what to do with all the art they'd amassed. Curator Jack Cowart remembers being startled at just how much the couple had stashed away: When he offered to bring their collection to Washington's National Gallery of Art to catalog it, it took five 40-foot tractor-trailers to haul it. (Doing justice to the collection and its scope on film requires sophisticated graphics and a good deal of ingenuity, and happily, director Sasaki possesses both.) Some 4,700 pieces of art left the apartment, headed for Washington — and then the Vogels started filling the newly emptied space again. They're still doing so, compulsive in a way that Herb and Dorothy depicts as at once crazy, smart, generous and enormously endearing. New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, with the assistance of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, have launched a national gifts program entitled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. It is distributing 2,500 works from the Vogels' collection of contemporary art throughout the nation, with fifty works going to a selected art institution in each of the fifty states. The best-known aspects of the Vogel Collection are minimal and conceptual art, but these donations also explore numerous directions of the post-minimalist period, including works of a figurative and expressionist nature. Primarily a collection of drawings, the 2,500 works the Vogels are donating also include paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints by more than 170 contemporary artists, mainly working in the United States, including Will Barnet (b. 1911), Robert Barry (b. 1936), Lynda Benglis (b. 1941), Dan Graham (b. 1942), Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Sylvia Plimack Mangold (b. 1938), Edda Renouf (b. 1943), Pat Steir (b. 1940), and Richard Tuttle (b. 1941). More: http://www.herbanddorothy.com