Pure Love

A few summers ago, in secret, an oversize moving van’s worth of art
came out of a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Then came
another huge-vanful, and another, until five of these megavans were
traveling stealthily from New York to Washington, D.C. This seemed
impossible given the size of the apartment, and it has not grown any
more believable since it happened, although it is entirely true. This
is one of the great legends of American art, like something out of a
children’s story: the infinitely giving apartment of Herb and Dorothy
Vogel.

The Vogels you may have heard of already: She worked as a librarian
and he as a postal worker, and they lived on her salary and collected
art with his. They had only two rules: The art had to be affordable and
it had to fit in their apartment. What they ended up with was an
apartment full of turtles (not, say, one or two, but more like seven or
eight), fish, cats, and art stacked so high that the bed kept rising.
They agreed a few years ago to give these more than 5,000 works of
mostly conceptual and minimal art—”they liked the most unlikable
stuff,” says Chuck Close, whose work is in their collection—to
the National Gallery of Art, which rewarded them with an annuity to
help with costs such as medical care. (The two are elderly now; they
resemble hobbits.) They took that annuity and bought more art to give
back to the National Gallery. Eventually the National Gallery decided
it could only take 1,000 of their works, and the museum and the Vogels
developed another plan for the rest: This year, it is being distributed
to museums in every state. Fifty works are coming to Seattle Art
Museum.

Megumi Sasaki’s documentary about their lives is a gem: We see them
heckling artists like Richard Tuttle about the “rejects” he’s made,
which they would like to acquire; we see their perplexed relatives in
matching blue recliners wondering why the hell these people can’t just
“live like us”; we see plaid blankets drawn back on artworks in their
apartment that they’ve been protecting from the light for decades (by
Sol LeWitt, Richard Artschwager, Andy Goldsworthy); we see their Carl
Andre sculpture in a chocolate box. Artists from John Baldessari to
Lynda Benglis refer to them as loving friends. Christo and
Jeanne-Claude tell about the time the Vogels wanted to buy a drawing
but couldn’t afford it, so the Vogels earned it by taking care of the
artists’ cat Gladys for a summer.

This is a no-bullshit zone, a haven for the cynics that today’s art
world abundantly produces. Art has never seemed so close, so familiar,
so simple, and so pure as when you look at it with the Vogels.