Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting in your rather modestly sized one bedroom apartment. Now imagine being in that space and being surrounded by over 4000 paintings, sculptures, and other pieces of modern art. So much art, in fact, stacked in every corner, to the ceilings, in every conceivable space, that when you donate it to one of the largest museums in the country, they don’t have room to accept it all. The art itself may be Minimalist, but there’s nothing minimal about that mental picture.
That’s the situation in which postal worker Herb Vogel and his librarian wife Dorothy found themselves in the early 1990s. Their decades-long obsession with purchasing art, often from some of the most important New York artists of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, often acquired before they became famous, had left them with a tiny apartment full to bursting with art. The only thing more amazing than the fact that they fit it all was that they managed to become two of New York’s most recognized and celebrated art collectors on a decidedly middle class income, and without ever selling a single piece of art that they’d bought. But what’s perhaps even more striking is that the Vogels, as Megumi Sasaki’s charming documentary, Herb & Dorothy puts on display, are such a shy, normal, unassuming pair.
Sasaki beautifully captures the Vogels’ love for art, motivated not by money, upward societal mobility, or a desire for status. Herb, quite tellingly, doesn’t even tell his coworkers at the Post Office about his “hobby”, and they only find out once the media starts doing profiles on them. Her film is a celebration not just of this couple, but of the notion that art doesn’t have to be a pursuit restricted to the intellectual and the moneyed, and that bypassing the visceral reaction for the cerebral when experiencing art of any kind is a mistake.
Ms. Sasaki will be in town tomorrow for a screening of her film at the Corcoran, and she took the time to answer some questions from DCist.
When did you first hear about the Vogels?
That was February 2002, I was working with Japanese public television, and I was assigned to work on an educational piece for the network featuring the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They had an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, and we were shooting there, and all the works at the show were part of Herb and Dorothy’s collection. Somebody told me who they were, and how they collected art, and the whole story, and I was very moved by it. And I went downstairs to the bookstore, and bought the catalog of Herb and Dorothy’s, hoping I could do something with the story. And that was 2002. And nothing happened, [but] the story stayed in the corner of my heart for the next two and a half years. September 2004, I happened to meet them in person — again, it was a Christo and Jeanne Claude event — and Herb and Dororthy were there, so that’s where it all started.
