HERB AND DOROTHY (Megumi Sasaki). 91 minutes. Screens tonight (Thursday, February 26), 7:30 pm, at the AGO, repeated Sunday (March 1), 4 pm. Rating: NNNN
Think art collectors are snobs you’d never relate to? Meet Herb And Dorothy, the subjects of the Reel Artists Film Fest’s opening-night film.
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Megumi Sasaki’s engaging documentary brings us face to face with Herb and Dorothy Vogel, builders of one of the world’s most important collections of contemporary art.
She was a librarian, he a postal clerk. Both had artistic aspirations, but when they realized that, as Herb says, “Everyone else was better than we were,” they decided instead to live off Dorothy’s salary and use Herb’s to buy art.
They went to the studios of artists they admired, most of them poverty-stricken and unknown in the early 60s. Over four decades, they snapped up close to 4,000 works that they hung and stored in their one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan.
Artists Christo and Jean-Claude, Chuck Close, Pat Steir and others who went on to fame and fortune recall how the Vogels came bearing cash and helped pay the rent.
But the real stars are the disarmingly unassuming Vogels themselves, who never sold a single item and finally gave the collection to Washington’s National Gallery of Art with the proviso that the it never charge the public admission. The gallery has plans to disperse the work throughout the U.S.
Passionate lovers of beauty, they redefine the term art lover.
