Art Patrons of a Different Stripe

The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, has the names of its major donors — or “benefactors” as they are labeled — chiseled into looming stone walls inside the main entrance. In many ways it’s a Who’s Who in American philanthropy: Getty, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Whitney are among the notable names carved on high. Corporate giants are represented as well, including IBM and Mobil.

And then there’s “Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.” She is a retired librarian; he is an erstwhile postal clerk. Art patrons of a decidedly different stripe.

In what some in the art world have called a “fairy-tale story,” this husband-and-wife team used civil-service incomes and decades of keen-eyed collecting to amass one of the most significant — and now priceless — assemblages of Modern art in the country, the majority of which they put in the hands of the National Gallery.

“It’s quite thrilling to see our names up there on the wall because we’re not in the same economic category of those other people,” Ms. Vogel says over the phone from the rent-controlled Manhattan apartment the pair has shared for decades. (She handles most news-media inquires now that Mr. Vogel has become increasingly frail with age.)

So that the couple’s more than 4,000 works can reach an even larger audience, last year the two began working with the National Gallery of Art on a two-year effort to donate 50 pieces to each of 50 American art museums, one in each state.

“We always thought we’d do it at some point,” Ms. Vogel says of the couple’s decision to donate the collection to the National Gallery. “We don’t have children, so we had to do something with it.”

One option would have been selling the collection and reaping the financial rewards that come from patronizing artists before their careers — and price tags — took flight.

“We never considered that.” Ms. Vogel says in a deadpan tone. “We’re not interested in its value. We bought art we liked and thought was good.”

“The Vogels are unique,” says Ruth Fine, a Modern-art curator at the National Gallery of Art, who has known the couple for more than 15 years. “Collecting art in the quantity they did is unusual, to be sure, and to have done it on the salary of a postal-service worker is unprecedented.”

Emerging Artists

Herbert Vogel was an ardent student of art history who passed his passion on to Dorothy when they met and married in the early 1960s. (The couple spent much of their honeymoon in Washington walking the galleries of the National Gallery of Art.)

They both tried their own hands at painting before realizing their true talents lay in collecting, not creating, art.

Much of hot art styles of the day — such as the “pop art” practiced by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol — were already too pricey for the couple, who had come to a unique arrangement: Her librarian’s salary would go toward their living expenses, his post-office pay would buy art.

They became enamored with — and often befriended — emerging artists, such as Christo, Sol LeWitt, Richard Tuttle, and others producing “minimal” and “conceptual” art. As a result, the Vogels’ collection is not composed of lush seascapes or portraits, but of some of the most avant-garde works of the era.

Take “Two Black Dots With a Space in Between,” a 1973 work by Richard Tuttle. It is just that: dots on a white piece of paper. Such works might leave the uninitiated scratching their heads, but Ms. Vogel says she and her husband unabashedly embraced the esoteric nature of their holdings.

“I don’t think we tried to educate people about what we liked,” she says. “We didn’t try to explain the art.”

The pair became fixtures of the cutting-edge art scene, haunting most every gallery opening and visiting artists in their studios to buy works on the spot. Along with their financial limits, the Vogels imposed one other restriction on their collecting habits: Everything they bought had to fit within their one-bedroom apartment.

Even so, it didn’t take long for their living space to become stuffed. “We had art in closets, on doors, and on the ceiling,” Ms. Vogel says. “We tried to utilize as much space possible.”

By 1991, with both Vogels retired and their swelling collection hampering mobility within their home, they decided to give most of it to the National Gallery of Art.

50 in 50

While plenty of museums in New York might have been interested in the collection, it was a National Gallery curator, no longer with the gallery, who first actively reached out to the couple. The Vogels also liked that the Washington institution charges no admission and has a policy against ever selling donated works.

It took five trucks to deliver the art the Vogels had amassed in their apartment so the museum could catalog it in Washington. The National Gallery took much of the collection in exchange for providing a modest annuity, the details of which have not been made public. The museum returned some of the art to the Vogels in New York.

True to form, the Vogels have used payments from the annuity, along with their small pensions, to acquire still more art. Ultimately they amassed more pieces than the National Gallery could accept or ever hope to display.

And so last year, “The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States” project was born, a collaboration involving not only the National Gallery but also the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ms. Fine, who worked with the Vogels to develop the plan and select the works involved, says it was inspired by Samuel Kress, the dime-store magnate who donated his Old Master paintings through his foundation to museums across the country in the 1930s.

The Vogels were frequently asked to give lectures at museums nationwide and so already had ties to many of the institutions selected to receive works. Ms. Fine helped them select the rest.

In accepting the 50 works, museums pledge to exhibit the gift in its entirety within five years and never to sell any of it. The art is to be fully distributed by next year. Institutions that have already received their allotments include the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Speed Art Museum, in Louisville, Ky.; and the Seattle Art Museum.

The Vogels had hoped to keep their collection all in one place. When its size made that an impossibility, technology provided an answer. A Web site will ultimately contain images of all 2,500 distributed works and link the institutions involved.

“One of the things they were interested in was conceptual art, and so this ties in beautifully: the notion of a conceptual collection,” says Ms. Fine.

The Vogels, slowed by age, are no longer the out-and-about darlings of the New York art scene. But they are not out of the limelight just yet. A new documentary film about them, “Herb and Dorothy,” is a hit on the film-festival circuit and will start playing in theaters next month. Meanwhile, the Vogels’ apartment still brims with art, but now most of it is on the walls, not stacked up in packing crates or poking out of closets.

Most — but not quite all.

“We still have some drawings underneath the bed,” Ms. Vogel allows.