Dorothy Vogel, one half of the husband-and-wife pair who became famous for building their impressive art collection while working as a postal worker and a librarian, respectively, died on November 10. Vogel died at 90 in a hospital in New York, according to the Washington Post. With her husband Herbert, she appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year between 1990, when the list was first published, and 2000.
Dorothy Vogel was born in 1935 in Elmira, New York. She met Herbert, a native New Yorker, in 1960, at which point she was working as a librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library system. (Herbert, a postal clerk, died in 2012 at age 89.) They immediately started collecting Minimalist and conceptual art—works on paper, paintings, and sculptures—by artists like Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Christo, Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis, and Pat Steir.
Most artists they collected were friends, and they never sold anything once it entered their collection, which was housed in their one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side. “How do you put a price on something, or someone, that is close to you?,” Dorothy Vogel remarked to the New York Times in 1992, in an article published soon after the Vogels announced that they would donate their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. At the time, Herb was 70, Dorothy was 56, and both had retired.
The Vogels had visited the National Gallery on their honeymoon in 1962, and appreciated that admission was free. At the time, they owned 2,500 artworks, all purchased with Herb’s postal worker salary; Dorothy’s reference librarian salary is what they lived on.
The filmmaker Megumi Sasaki made two documentaries about the Vogels. Herb & Dorothy came out in 2008 and is a charming account of their relationship and decades voracious collecting. By the time the film came out, the Vogels’ collection included some 4,000 artworks, and they were finally winding down their acquisitions. Herb & Dorothy 50 x 50, a 2013 follow-up to the first documentary, traces the Vogels’ initiative to donate one artwork to a museum in each of the 50 US states.
