New York is the setting for countless urban legends, from the yarn about alligators inhabiting the sewers to the commonly held misconception that tossing a penny off the top of the Empire State Building can kill a passerby below. But alongside those oft-repeated myths exists another set of New York tales that—though they sound equally unlikely—just happen to be true. Herbert and Dorothy Vogel are the subjects of one such story.
Herbert, 86, and Dorothy, 73, are a retired postal worker and a retired librarian, respectively. Both come from modest backgrounds; they’ve lived in the same small rent-controlled apartment since 1963. And over the course of 45 years, they’ve managed to amass one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world: some 4,500 pieces, mostly by Minimalist and conceptualist art stars like Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and Robert Mangold. Perhaps most confounding—in this age of art investment funds and eight-figure auction prices—is that the Vogels have never sold a single work. Despite the fact that cashing in on just a modest portion of their holdings could turn these coupon-clipping senior citizens into multimillionaires, they’ve never even considered it. “We just didn’t do that,” says Dorothy, a petite, cheerful woman in a gray T-shirt and dangling rainbow earrings. “That’s not why we bought art.”
Why they did buy—and just how they were able to buy so much—are questions that the Vogels are attempting to answer on a rainy Friday afternoon in their Manhattan apartment. Collectors’ abodes are often referred to as “art filled,” but in the Vogels’ case, that description is literally true; the place looks more like an off-site Museum of Modern Art storage facility than a typical home. “We started out with regular furniture, and then we started having exhibitions,” explains Dorothy of their eccentric domestic situation. “Drawings went out unframed—we’d left them unframed so we’d have space for them—and when they came back, they were framed. Instead of taking them out of frames, we kept the crates that they came back in, and then one crate went on top of another crate, and pretty soon we had to get rid of the furniture!” Other than a bed and a kitchenette, the tiny dining nook is the only remaining habitable space. On the walls, dozens of Richard Tuttles share space with a grouping of Pat Steir paintings, while Steve Keister sculptures descend from the ceiling. The Vogels—who are the subjects of a new documentary, Herb and Dorothy, that’s being screened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in November—don’t get out much anymore (Herb has trouble walking), so it’s here that they spend most of their time, in the company of their cat, Archie, and 10 pet turtles who swim around in several tanks.
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