In the early days of their marriage—back when they had a sofa—the Vogels’ own creations covered the walls. The couple, who met in 1960 and married a year later, first entered the art world as aspiring artists: Dorothy created graphic, hard-edged paintings; Herb had a more Expressionistic style. Herb had grown up in Upper Manhattan, the son of Eastern European immigrants, and, though he never finished high school, had developed a strong curiosity about art history in his early 20s. He began checking out art books from the library and taking art history classes at New York University while working nights as a mail clerk. When he met Dorothy, then a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, she had no real interest in the subject. During their courtship, she remembers, “we never discussed it.” On their honeymoon in Washington, D.C., she got what she describes as “my first art lesson”: a Herb-led tour of the National Gallery. “I was a fast learner, and I enjoyed it too,” she says, “so looking at art became something we did together.”
Back in New York, looking at art soon led to making art, and the couple started befriending fellow artists. The Vogels acquired their first piece, a small, crushed metal John Chamberlain sculpture, in 1962, and, Dorothy says, “slowly our own work started to come down off the walls, and the work of other artists started to replace it. We realized that, as painters, we weren’t so great.” Once they began buying, it became “sort of an obsession,” she admits. Evenings were spent at openings and on studio visits, and Saturdays were devoted to checking out galleries and museums. “There was a brief time that there were galleries open on Sundays, so we started going on Sundays too,” remembers Dorothy. “I resented that! It was my one day to catch up with housework!”
Before long they were living on Dorothy’s earnings and devoting Herb’s entire salary to buying art. Still, when it came to their collecting budget, they were a far cry from Peggy Guggenheim. Happily, the Minimalist and conceptual art they were drawn to had yet to catch on with the masses, so they were able to pick up works for a song. Their only criteria for adding a piece to the collection were that they both had to like it and that it had to fit into their apartment. They also turned down a few things for practical reasons, which Dorothy says she now regrets. “There was a Richard Serra that we did not get because I was afraid someone would get killed on it,” she recalls, “or at least lose an arm or a leg!”
As the artists whose work they collected gained fame, they continued to sell to the Vogels for well under market value, often directly from their studios. Cutting out the galleries is usually a no-no, but most dealers make an exception for the Vogels. “When they first bought from me, I called Sol and said, ‘What should I charge them?’” says Steir, who met the couple in LeWitt’s studio in the late Sixties and has been close with them ever since. “And he said, ‘Take off three zeros and cut the price in half.’ And then they paid month by month on the installment plan.”
