Showing posts tagged with Herb.
Herb & Dorothy
Posted June 25th, 2011 by Manitou Galleries
In the early 1960s, Herb and Dorothy Vogel began collecting work from up-and-coming contemporary artists. Herb was a postal clerk and Dorothy a librarian. They decided to live on her salary and dedicate his paycheck to purchasing art. Over the subsequent years, they filled their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with more than 2,000 works.
Their story was told in the 2008 documentary film “Herb & Dorothy.” Now, the National Gallery of Art (to which the Vogels gifted most of their collection in 1992) has begun a program of spreading the works around: “The Herb and Dorothy Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States.”
The Vogels (the value of the collection has appreciated into millions of dollars) have never sold a work. Despite the Vogel’s modest means, James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s UK, in his book “Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945,” placed Herb and Dorothy among the top art collectors in the world, alongside the likes of Getty, Rockefeller, and Mellon.
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