The Unlikely Medici : A Pair of Art Fans Assemble What May Be the ‘Premier Collection’ of Its Type

Herb and Dorothy Vogel’s one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is small, even by New York standards. The Vogels themselves are also small, each about five feet tall. It is almost impossible to imagine that they could have lived in a space that size along with 2,500 works of art, albeit small ones, and their eight cats, 19 fish and 20 turtles.

The Vogels are unlikely Medici. One trip to their apartment will confuse any visitor who associates collectors with Mercedes double-parked outside Christie’s on Park Avenue. J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dispelled any misimpressions last week when he announced that the Vogel collection would be entering the gallery’s permanent collection, as a donation and purchase.

“This is perhaps the premier collection of modern and contemporary drawings in a field of 20th-Century art in which we were virtually barren--minimalism and conceptualism,” Brown told an audience at the National Press Club last week, where he announced the donation.

“It’s particularly remarkable,” Brown added, “because the Vogels devoted their lives to this collection, at great personal sacrifice--he was on the salary of the Postal Service, she was a reference librarian in Brooklyn--and at great discomfort. They have befriended the artists, watched the trends, brought all this together as a collection as a work of art in itself.”

At home, surrounded by their animals and by blank walls--the National Gallery has been taking inventory of their collection in Washington since September, 1990--Herbert and Dorothy Vogel’s perspective on their collection was a bit less spectacular than Brown’s, but perhaps more illuminating on the 30 years the Vogels have spent acquiring art.

“I wouldn’t call it a sacrifice,” said Herb, with a stentorian voice. The 69-year-old retired postal worker sat with his brown-and-cream-colored cat Renoir in his lap. Renoir stuck his tongue out at Whistler, Manet, and Degas, all cats who had gathered around.

The filters for the turtle and fish tanks gurgled loudly.

“We lived on my salary and we spent his on the art,” said Dorothy, 56, who is the same height as her husband. “Now we live on my pension and we spend his on art. It really was no sacrifice because there was nothing else we really wanted to buy.” The couple has never owned a car, she said. Herb’s clashing plaid trouser and blazer looked well-worn. The clutter in the apartment is anything but minimalist.

Herb, the principal “animal person” of the couple, is also the one who initiated their interest in art after the two were married in 1962.

A postal clerk by day, Herb was a painter by avocation--”I worked in the abstract Expressionist style”--and on their honeymoon, he gave Dorothy her first art lesson in the National Gallery. Back in New York, both Vogels studied painting in the evenings (“She was better than I was,” Herb said) and rented a studio where they painted after work. It wasn’t long before one wall of their apartment was covered with her paintings. His were on another wall.

At the same time, they started buying art. The first work they acquired was “Crushed Car Piece” by John Chamberlain. The Vogels decline to say how much they paid for it, and will not discuss the prices of any pieces in their collection. Recent sales of work similar to theirs ranged from $5,000 to $35,000, although record sales have surpassed $250,000.

Just as the Vogels were starting to visit galleries, two new styles were emerging: pop art, which drew its imagery from consumer products, advertising, and the media, and minimalism, a pared-down, often-austere examination of monochromatic surfaces and essential forms.

Pop art, however, “had become expensive very quickly,” said Dorothy, “because the American public responded to it. They could identify it; whereas the minimal art was not accepted, and therefore it was easily available and affordable, which is the key thing, since both of us were working. . . . We didn’t have a lot of money then and we don’t now, but minimal and conceptual work was much easier to buy. We liked it so we gravitated toward it.”

By 1965, the Vogels had acquired their first works by Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Mangold, whom Herb Vogel described as struggling artists at the time. “They may not remember, but I do,” he said.

The orderliness and clarity of Judd’s work, Dorothy said, “appealed to my sense of aesthetics.” Their first Mangold painting, a work in red, she said, “had a sense of color rare in minimalist work.”

As they bought art by other artists--whom they also got to know in the days when, the Vogels say, galleries were more intimate and relaxed--slowly the Vogels’ work came down from the walls and the work of other artists went up.

“One day we realized we had a collection,” said Dorothy. “It happened unconsciously.”

“I knew I wasn’t any good as a painter,” Herb said. “And rather than continue. . . . “

His wife interrupted. “We thought we’d be better at collecting than painting.”

“And we were right,” Herb said. “Nobody would be coming here if we were painting, I can assure you. At least I admit it. A lot of other people won’t.”

Unlike many young dealers without much money, the Vogels bought very few prints and concentrated on one-of-a-kind objects. It wasn’t long before their reputation became known. In 1975, they had the first exhibition of their collection at the Clocktower Gallery in New York City.

Soon the Vogels’ apartment became a regular visiting spot for curators and collectors from Europe, where minimalism’s appeal was strong (the couple was even featured in a German guidebook to New York). While the couple had given up traveling to Europe to visit museums, concentrating their funds on buying more art, they sent off works from their collection to exhibitions in the Netherlands and Germany in the 1970s.

Although the Vogels were now known in the international art world as important collectors, Herb and Dorothy almost never discussed their art with colleagues at work (“I didn’t think they’d be interested,” said Herb) or with the doormen in their building, who became suspicious when huge crates bound for exhibitions abroad emerged from the couple’s tiny apartment.

“Every time this happens for any show, people think we’re moving out,” Herb said with a chuckle. “The landlord sends people over to see if we’re leaving and not paying our rent. Now we always have to tell the guard in our building that we’re having a show and we’re not moving out. This wasn’t happening in the middle of the night, but so much stuff would come out of this apartment that they started wondering.”

The Vogels’ art collection had by then taken up every inch of available space in the apartment. Paintings and drawings were clustered on the wall and stacked up from the floor toward the ceiling, even under the couple’s bed. A narrow corridor led from the apartment door to a small terrace, where the couple stored outdoor sculpture.

“They dedicated every dollar they found beyond their bare necessities and every ounce of their energy,” says David Ross, now director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, who has known the Vogels for more than 20 years. “I always saw them at every opening at every gallery. They were always there, talking to artists, trying to learn more, trying to understand more. It was extraordinarily revealing to see how they lived and how they lived with their art. Their art was their family. The collection was their surrogate children.”

By the 1980s, even as the Vogels continued collecting, the art world had changed. Prices were spiraling upward and the Vogels had not yet even conducted an inventory of the works they owned. In 1987, on a 25th-anniversary visit to Washington and the National Gallery, the Vogels renewed their acquaintance with 20th-Century curator Jack Cowart, an admirer of the collection. Cowart suggested that the National Gallery do the inventory. The gallery shipped off the entire collection to Washington in September, 1990.

While many museums were interested in their collection, last year the Vogels decided that their art would go to the National Gallery.

“One of the reasons we like the National Gallery is that they don’t sell,” Dorothy said. “We don’t want to give our collection away and then have people sell it. If anybody’s going to sell it, we’d do it ourselves. Our goal was always to keep the collection together.”

Other considerations involved in choosing the National Gallery were its free admission and its lack of minimalist and conceptual work.

“It’s filling a gap,” said Dorothy. “We’re not just adding another Sol LeWitt or a Mangold. Ours are the first to enter their collection.”

Although the entire collection is physically at the gallery (except for what Herb has just bought), legal ownership will be transferred at intervals. The first part of this transfer will be 214 paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Lynda Benglis, Cristo, and others.

“It’s more gift than sale,” Dorothy said. “It’s not enough to change our standard of living, but it’s enough to maintain it, so we can continue to live the way we are now, even though my pension will not go up.”

“We won’t get rich on it, that’s for sure,” Herb said.

Even with their art collection gone, the Vogels’ apartment looks like a gallery storeroom, particularly since the couple is continuing to acquire art. Four wrapped paintings were leaning against the living-room wall last weekend, alongside boxes of masking tape and plastic packing materials.

“Like the best of collectors, the Vogels chronicle a period and scene,” said Whitney director David Ross. “In their case, it’s the New York scene in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, where they had been the most active.”

Ross is quick to point out that, even as their collection became widely known, the Vogels remained outside the mold of collectors. “They’re running against the tide of collecting as investment, collecting as social lubricant, collecting to decorate the room,” he said. “These people collected because that’s how they lived, that’s how they breathed.”

Dorothy contends that, even today, collections can be built without much money, if buyers concentrate on works by young, emerging artists. She also says that collectors have an important responsibility to buy works that museums might be too cautious or bureaucratic to acquire. She offers her own collection as an example.

“By buying it as a collector,” she said, “we have it for 20 or 30 years. By the time it gets to a board, they’ve now come to accept whatever has been done 40 or 50 years before.”

While the Vogels are continuing to buy works of artists they’ve collected over those decades, they admit that they like art from all periods. Dorothy, however, cites one style she dislikes: graffiti. “I never cared for it in the subway, and I didn’t want it on my walls.”

The walls of the Vogels’ apartment are due to be painted this year for the first time in decades, now that the collection is in Washington.

“I don’t know if I can handle living in a regular living room anymore,” Dorothy said, “after years of not having a living room.”