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.