Vogels put their eggs into many baskets

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will receive 50 artworks as part of a nationwide bonanza of donations from New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. As one of the first 10 recipients in a three-phase gift program to be announced today, MOCA will enrich its collection with pieces by 21 artists, including Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis, Dan Graham and Carl Andre.

“It’s a terrific acquisition that builds on the collection we have established and coincides with our exhibition history,” said Jeremy Strick, the museum’s director. “Of the 50 works, 37 are drawings -- the largest gift of drawings since the Marcia Simon Weisman bequest of 83 drawings in 1996.”

Along with 17 watercolor and graphite works on paper by Tuttle and five pastels by Edda Renouf is a sculpture made of chrome-plated and flocked eggs by Robert Marshall Watts and a painting of the collectors by Daryl Trivieri.

An exhibition of the donation will be presented in a year or two, Strick said.

The Vogels are well known in the art world as passionate and dedicated collectors who have amassed a vast trove of contemporary art on a surprisingly low budget. They began collecting in the late 1960s, living on Herbert’s salary as a U.S. Postal Service employee and purchasing art with Dorothy’s earnings as a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library.

In keeping with their means, the couple usually bought small works, primarily drawings. And in keeping with their taste, they concentrated on Minimal and Conceptual art. But as the collection grew, it embraced a broad range of materials and artistic sensibilities.

“We surprised ourselves,” Dorothy Vogel said by phone this week from her home. “We never thought about it. We just did it.”

In 1992, the Vogels transferred 1,000 pieces from their holdings to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., through a purchase and gift arrangement.

In their latest move -- with the help of the National Gallery -- they have set up “The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States” to distribute 2,500 contemporary artworks throughout the country, with 50 pieces going to a selected art institution in each state.

The National Endowment for the Arts has funded a book about the project, to be published late this year. The Institute of Museum and Library Services will pay packing and shipping costs of the artworks and develop a website on the project.

Also named in the initial round of recipients are the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky.; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Mass.; the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey; the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin; and the Seattle Art Museum.

Twenty additional institutions to be announced will receive gifts by the end of this year. The remaining 20 will receive theirs in 2009.

Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in Modern art at the National Gallery, was the mastermind of the project, Vogel said. But the inspiration came from Samuel H. Kress, who built a collection of European paintings, sculpture and decorative arts in the early 20th century. He gave 1,800 works to the National Gallery and an additional 1,300 pieces to communities across the country where he had established Kress 5-and-10-cent stores.

The Vogels selected many recipients of their gifts “for personal reasons,” Dorothy Vogel said, referring to museums where she and her husband have given lectures, exhibited their collection and become acquainted with the staff.

“We chose MOCA because we knew Jeremy Strick and [curator] Ann Goldstein, and they showed a lot of our works by Richard Tuttle,” she said.

All the museums must show the donated artworks at least once within five years of receiving them, Vogel said. “And they cannot deaccession the work. If they go out of business or close, they have to give the whole package to another institution.

“We are very excited about this,” she said. “People ask how I feel about the collection being broken up, but this is a way of keeping it together. It is not being broken up. It’s just going to be in 50 different locations.”

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com