The Vogels … art lovers, not moguls - art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel

Interview, May, 1994 by Steven Garbarino

Herb and Dorothy: the Vogels. You may remember them as collecting curios, art-world anomalies, from when their story broke a few years ago. Herb was a retired postal clerk who didn't collect stamps. Dorothy was a retired librarian who didn't collect books. "We always knew what we wanted: it was art or nothing," says Dorothy Vogel, fifty-nine.

Today, the married couple, neither of whom stands higher than five feet tall, may be the best-known private collectors of minimal, conceptual, and post-'60s art in the country. Beginning thirty years ago with a crushed car by sculptor John Chamberlain, they amassed more than 2,000 works in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, including drawings, sculptures, and paintings by such influential artists as Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, Richard Tuttle, Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, and Richard Long. In 1992 the two pledged their collection in installments to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Ninety of those works, once hoarded away in broom closets and stacked under their bed, will be on view at the gallery from May 29 through November 27. "From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection" is the first major showing at the National Gallery of their cache, some of which was given to the couple as gifts and much of which they acquired when art sold for a good deal less. The Vogels are an example of what art collectors don't have to be - millionaires, "Rockefellers," says Herb, seventy-one. "We don't have any real advice for first-time collectors," says Dorothy. "We buy what we like, what we can afford, and what can fit into our apartment. But we hope that the exhibition will encourage others living on small incomes to buy art, too."