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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > October > 13
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Meet ‘Herb & Dorothy’ tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS
Now, that the recession has taken the frenzy out of the over-heated — and over-hyped — art market, a new documentary ‘Herb & Dorothy,’ on PBS tonight, reminds us of a couple who, without any independent financial means of their, amassed one of the most impressive collections of art simply driven by their passion.
Beginning in the early 1960s Herb Vogel, a high-school dropout and aspiring artist worked as a postal clerk, and his wife Dorothy, a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, filled their modest one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with the art they loved — chiefly work by minimalist and conceptual artists who at the time were just emerging and mostly unknown.
The Vogels devoted all of Herb’s salary to acquisitions and lived modestly off of Dorothy’s librarian salary. They had two rules: the piece had to be affordable and it had to fit their tiny apartment
Their first purchase? A small, table-top sculpture by John Chamberlain.
‘Herb & Dorothy’ broadcasts tonight at 9 p.m. on PBS. The hour-long film, by Megumi Sasaki, is kicks off the Independent Lens series, a weekly anthology of new documentaries.
Not only did they become regular fixtures on the New York art scene, the Vogels befriended with many artists including Sol LeWitt, Chuck Close, Richard Tuttle and Robert and Sylvia Mangold.
While ‘Herb and Dorothy’ doesn’t unearth a deep portrait of the couple, it does serve up a glimpse of the Vogel’s and their singular style: They once agreed to take care of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s cat for a summer in exchange for art from Christo.
The Vogels collected more than 4,700 works of art and in the early 1990s moved their entire collection to the National Museum of Art — the first museum they had visited together on their honeymoon in 1962.
With the Vogel collection so large, the couple and the National Museum hatched a creative way to share. Some 50 museums — one in state — would each receive 50 works of art from the Vogel collection with the proviso that the entire gift be exhibited together once within five years and that if it were deaccessioned, it had to be done only as a whole.
To chose the 50 museums for The Vogel 50x50 project, the Vogels used a range of personal criteria. Here in the Lone Star State, the Blanton Museum of Art earned the mantel as the UT museum had in 1997 hosted an exhibit of Vogel’s collection — well, just a part of it, that is.
The Blanton received its ‘Vogel 50x50’ collection this summer.
Image: ‘Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe,’ Richard Pettibone. Acrylic and silkscreen, 1973.
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