November 2008

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Mr and Mrs Vogel worked through the week, and collected at weekends. Her salary paid the bills, his funded the increasingly obsessive passion for buying art. Their beat was Soho and the Lower East Side. ‘Saturday was the big day’, remembers Mrs Vogel, smiling, and her husband chuckles. ‘Every Saturday, even after we retired – that’s 18 years ago this year – we did the galleries because that’s where everyone goes’, she says. ‘Then we’d visit studios after work in the week.’ Artists were impressed by their relentless energy to see everything, by the way they looked and understood what artists were doing. The artist Lucio Pozzi remembers Herbert Vogel visiting a gallery ‘like one of those hogs that look for truffles’.

Some of the first drawings they bought were by Sol LeWitt, in 1965, the year they gave up their studio: ‘we were better at being collectors than artists’. As Mrs Vogel tells the story, ‘Herbie knew Sol since the 50s, when they both went to the Cedar Bar. When Sol was having his first show he invited us. We liked it but did not buy. Then we decided to buy. Later he came to us and wanted to trade it for a more mature piece.’ The Vogels would check out shows at Leo Castelli, Stable Gallery and, especially, Martha Jackson Gallery. ‘That was a big one’, Mrs Vogel recalls. ‘I saw my first Andy Warhol there. She showed abstract artists like Michael Goldberg. And Paula Cooper was a major 70s figure, showing Jo Shapiro, Alan Shields, Bob Mangold.’

Friendships with artists were vital to the Vogels. ‘The Tuttles were living on 11th Avenue and 53rd when we met in 1970, I think. We’d take the bus there. We knew him because we saw his work at Betty Parsons, his cloth pieces tacked directly on the wall. They were revolutionary for their time. We were intrigued but they were too expensive. The gallery said Richard was doing a multiple. My husband didn’t like multiples, just unique pieces. So I bought it and stuck it up on the wall.’ Mrs Vogel points to the wall behind her, where a different Tuttle is displayed above the doorway (visible in Figure 3). ‘He asked me to put the drawing on the wall, then measured the wire, pinned it and let the loop find its own gravity. A lot of his work is concerned with shadow, he’s very particular about placement. My husband selected that one with Richard. The drawing has gone to the National Gallery.’ On the adjacent walls hang other Tuttles and some Pat Steirs, a couple of Steve Keister ceiling pieces, and a delicate Brice Marden protected with a piece of red-and-white check cloth.