Event

Herb & Dorothy

Thursday, June 25 at 7:30pm
In Person: Filmmaker MEGUMI SASAKI

Members $9 / Public $12 / Includes Reception
Active Membership Will Be Checked

Herb & Dorothy tells the extraordinary story of Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means. In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to Minimalist and Conceptual Art, Herb and Dorothy Vogel quietly began purchasing the works of unknown artists. Devoting all of Herb's salary to purchase art they liked and living on Dorothy's paycheck alone, they continued collecting artworks guided by two rules: the piece had to be affordable and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Within these limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries; most of those they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned artists including Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert and Sylvia Mangold, Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi and Lawrence Weiner. In 1992, the Vogels made headlines that shocked the art world: their entire collection was moved to the National Gallery of Art, the vast majority of it as an outright gift to the institution. Many of the works they acquired at modest prices appreciated to become worth several million dollars, yet the Vogels never sold a single piece to breakdown the collection.While there are countless films that feature artists, there are few about art collectors.

USA, 2008, 89 min.