Living for Art: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection

September 24, 2010 – January 2, 2011

If you're rich, it's easy to start a collection. But if you need your paycheck to pay the rent and phone bill, and you want to collect, you've got to depend on instinct. What you feel in your head and heart. Wits and guts. —Herbert Vogel, 1992

I think knowing the artists adds another dimension because you get to really know the work a lot better. You understand it better, and you see things through their eyes. —Dorothy Vogel, 1994

The remarkable story of the Vogels is by now the stuff of lore: He a postal clerk, she a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, who decided, shortly after they married in 1962, to live on Dorothy's salary and to devote Herb's to purchasing art. Together, on a small budget but with a grand vision, they collected thousands of pieces over a 30-year span, cramming their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with cutting-edge treasures. They earned as well the admiration of artists, who were aware of the Vogels' limited funds and who appreciated their enthusiastic response to a range of contemporary practices. Artists inscribed many of the artworks to the Vogels, often with great affection.

Unable to continue to house their collection, Dorothy and Herb, through the National Gallery of Art, launched a nationwide gifts program, Fifty Works for Fifty States, distributing 2,500 works of contemporary art throughout the country, with 50 works going to a selected art institution in each of the 50 states.

The Montclair Art Museum was chosen as the recipient in New Jersey. This exhibition features the 50 gifts of contemporary art the Museum recently received as part of the Fifty Works for Fifty States initiative.

The best-known aspects of the Vogel Collection are minimal and conceptual art, but these donations also explore numerous directions of the post-minimalist period, including works of a figurative and expressionist nature. Primarily a collection of drawings, the 2,500 Vogel donations also include paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints by more than 170 contemporary artists, mainly working in the United States.  MAM’s collection includes works by Stephen Antonakos (b. 1926), Will Barnet (b. 1911), Robert Barry (b. 1936), Lynda Benglis (b. 1941), Bill Jensen (b. 1945), Edda Renouf (b. 1943), and Richard Tuttle (b. 1941). At MAM, this exhibition will explore the themes of philanthropy and collecting.

To read the press release, click here.

For exhibition-related programming and other events, click here.

To read about MAM's Babson Lecture, where Herb and Dorothy discussed their collection with artists and MAM's curator Gail Stavitsky, click here.

TO watch a view segment on the exhibition, featuring Cheif Curator Gail Stavitsky, from NHK WORLD News from Japan, click here. (English content)

Top: Herbert and Dorothy Vogel at  Clocktower (1975), from Herb and Dorothy, an Arthouse Films Release, 2009, with a drawing by Philip Pearlstein behind them. Photography Credit: Nathaniel Tileston. Courtesy Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Above: Martin Johnson, FOR, 1989; mixed media: acrylic, wood, wire, cotton twine, fabric (or webbing), plastic cocktail sticks; 15 1/2 x 14 x 1 1/2 inches. (Inscribed on verso: Herb and Dot, 1/10, FOR, 1989.)

The full story of the Vogels is told in the documentary Herb & Dorothy (2009, 87 minutes), directed by Megumi Sasaki, which is shown on a continuous loop in the gallery as part of the exhibition. For trailers of the movie, click on the links below.