A Couple of True Art Lovers : Admirable donation by two New Yorkers to collection at National Gallery

An art historian we know makes buying a work of art one of the requirements for her freshman introduction to art appreciation. The course is by no means for wealthy students only, and the purchase need not be made in an elegant gallery. An antique store will do, or a flea market, or some combination of the two. (Los Angeles, she says, is rich in combinations of the two.)

What counts is that the student have the experience of spending a little money--and a little will do--for a one-of-a-kind object purchased for its beauty alone. In the nature of student budgets, the work acquired is almost invariably by artists of little renown, but that very anonymity is crucial to the assignment. The student makes, so to speak, an unprotected aesthetic decision. Wise or unwise as the decision may be, the young buyer discovers in it the thrill of art appreciation itself. He or she discovers what it is to be a person who can make an artistic choice and stand behind it.

There is, of course, another way to collect art, one that does not stand on one’s own honest opinion of the work but clings to a consensus. Those who collect in this way are art investors, not art collectors. They buy planning to sell. What counts for them is not the beauty of the work but the market for it.

Over the last 20 years, as one leading art critic after another has found occasion to lament, art investors have gained ground and true art collectors have lost it. What a pleasure then to read David D’Arcy’s report in The Times last week of Herb and Dorothy Vogel’s donation of a major collection of conceptualist and minimalist art to the National Gallery in Washington. The Vogels--a retired postal worker and a librarian--bought what they loved until their one-bedroom apartment in New York ended up housing a national treasure.

Their collection is being transferred to the National Gallery by a combination of sale and donation, but the proceeds will be modest, and the Vogels’ income is so dwarfed by the value of their collection that gimlet-eyed tax calculation is knocked into a cocked hat. The Vogels have given as they acquired, in the joy of seeing and the exhilaration of sharing. The National Gallery is the richer for having a major lacuna in its holdings splendidly filled. The nation is heartened by the discovery among us of a pair of collectors in the noble tradition still alive and well--and still collecting!