Herb and Dorothy (2008)

I missed the short run the Kendall Landmark gave the 2008 documentary Herb and Dorothy a few months ago. Apparently, I also missed it on PBS’s Independent Lens, but we all know how hard it is to keep up with PBS’s schedule. I was finally just able to see it on video. The film follows the legendary New York City art collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, who built up a valuable collection of Conceptual and Minimalist art with only their meagre salaries as a postal worker and librarian. The couple stuffed their small apartment with artwork nobody else really wanted to buy, the kind of art people love to hate, at least when a significant value is applied to it. With Dorothy’s salary covering the rent and other necessities, Herb’s was devoted entirely to buying art, mostly directly from artists in studio sales (which pissed off a few gallery owners).

The Vogels have been the subject of many print features, but never a feature film and since almost everything remotely interesting gets a movie made about it these days, why not? It’s a shame the film came so late because I feel the Vogels (especially Herb) might have been a little more interesting ten or twenty years ago. Today, they’re a little past their prime and aren’t as interesting as subjects as one might have thought. Certainly their story is interesting, as is their collection, but the collection itself doesn’t fill a feature length film nearly as well as it filled their cramped one-bedroom apartment. Herb, although his passion for art is still visible, isn’t as sharp as he probably was. And Dorothy seems more caretaker to her aging husband than anything else, though she cares for their drawings as well as she does for Herb, keeping them draped in sheets to prevent fading from exposure to light, refusing almost anyone a peek.

These are people that have a Sol LeWitt in their bathroom, if you can really have a Sol Lewitt line drawing. Their apartment was so stuffed with art objects by the likes of Richard Tuttle, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Chuck Close, and Pat Steir that they had to give it all to the National Gallery in ‘92, which could only absorb a portion of it. The rest was distributed to museums across the country in the Vogel 50×50 program. Another movie is being made about that. What’s really amazing is through all these years they never sold a thing, when one sale in the 1980s could have substantially raised their standard of living, at the least providing them with a little more space to display (at the least store) their collection. After the artwork was transferred to the National Gallery the Vogels were provided with a small annuity, which they spent on more art to fill up their apartment once again. The film never divulges what the Vogels pay for art and one gets the sense that they’re receiving substantial discounts from artists like Richard Tuttle, whom they used to partronize and have now hit it big. So, maybe if they did start to sell, artists would be less generous, ending this practice of reverse patronage.

One can’t watch the film without having at least some appreciation for the Vogel’s taste, that seems less ahead of its time than it is simply passionate and open in its aesthete sensibility. One also gets the sense that they simply bought so much, that some of the artists they bought from were bound to become famous and valued by the Academy and the art market. The Vogel’s dialogue on their collection is strangely devoid of the critical engagement offered by those art historians, critics, and sometimes even artists interviewed in the film. Strange in that we’re not used to hearing about Sol LeWitt without this dialogue, because this art is so difficult to get or like without it. Conceptual art depends on a dialogue with these eponymous concepts.

The one-bedroom looks like something on A&E’s Hoarders and that’s a difficult thing to reckon with their aesthetic sensibilities. One usually associates art collections with clean gallery spaces and posh apartments with imported steel and leather sofas. Even storage rooms furnished with flat-files and crates are organized, clean, and catalogued. The space usually agrees with the art it contains and, I think often in the case of private collectors, fulfils the same visual tastes the art does. The Vogel’s cluttered apartment contrasts so much with the spacious studios and rooms of the critics and now-famous artists interviewed (not to mention the clean lines of their Don Judds), that one feels a little bad for them, like they ended up with the short end of the stick.

Herb and Dorothy is a love story about the couple’s marriage and their life-long love affair with art. The Vogels are so removed from the art market, never having bought or sold at auction, that their (now gifted) collection is unpolluted by lucre and it’s very much because of this that the art world holds the couple in such high esteem. If one takes any thing away from the film, it’s the respect the art world has for the Vogels; these people who have a more ardent and unadulterated love for art than almost any artist, gallerist, or critic. The Vogels are still buying art and have toured with this movie on the festival circuit, spreading their collecting doctrine: buy what you like, can afford, and can fit into your home (there’s some flexibility to this last one).

Tagged as: art collections, art movies, Conceptual art, contemporary art, documentary, Minimalism