Sharing it out
Louise Nicholson meets Herbert and Dorothy Vogel at home in Manhattan to talk about their extraordinary gift of 2,500 modern drawings to 50 museums across the US. Portrait by Lanola Stone.
Louise Nicholson, Sunday, 29th June 2008
So, how have a modest couple – he a post office worker in Manhattan, she a librarian in Brooklyn – built up such a huge and notable collection and then fired this enthusiasm in government bodies? It began on their honeymoon in 1962, when Mr Vogel took his bride to the National Gallery in Washington. ‘Herb started teaching me’, she remembers, slipping her hand over his on the table. ‘So I got my first lesson there. Then we came back to New York to the Guggenheim, the Met, Whitney, MOMA.’ They both enrolled at New York’s Institute of Fine Art, too, and kept a studio. ‘I was more hard-edge; he was more abstract expressionist.’ They took vacations in Europe, and during a theatre trip to London in 1970 visited the Whitechapel and Lisson galleries, rather than museums. ‘That was our last pleasure trip. After that it was for art exhibitions – Finland, Israel, Amsterdam. Then we stopped travel because it was cheaper to buy drawings.’
The attraction to drawings was three-fold: the price, the small size and ‘the artist’s hand is in them, the ideas are there’, says Mrs Vogel. ‘We had no competitors because people were not interested in drawings, they were seen as inferior to paintings and sculptures. Americans were busy buying Pop Art and Abstract Expressionists – De Kooning and Rothko were still alive.’
The Vogels focused on younger artists, and especially on minimal and conceptual art. ‘We had fresh minds, we learnt together’, explains Mrs Vogel. ‘New York was very exciting for art, and everything was cheaper 40 years ago.’ Mr Vogel, who had hated school but read voraciously about art, led the way. As he remembers it: ‘We did it night and day.’ They were often the first to buy from an artist. ‘In those days an artist was just happy if you wanted to see their work, not to buy. Dealers did not always pay the artists on time. But we always did, so they liked us.’ The Vogels often came cash in hand, paying by instalments to buy the more expensive works. And they preferred to buy pieces they could take home with them on the subway.
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