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Herb and Dorothy: mesmerized by minimalism
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"Herb and Dorothy" is a documentary film that like its subjects, Herb and Dorothy Vogel, exalts beauty and our relationship to art and its aesthetics. Megumi Sasaki's camera gains access to the inner sanctuary of the Vogels' one-bedroom Manhattan apartment that doubles as a petite exhibition hall for one of the most comprehensive and heralded collections of New Art--minimal and conceptual. The Vogels--Herb, a retired postal worker and Dorothy, a former New York City public librarian--acquired and collected work from the New York New Art scene since the 1960s, paying their living costs with Dorothy's salary and purchasing as of yet unheralded art by unknown artists with Herb's modest earnings.
Early in the film, the artist Lucio Pozzi confides to the camera (and to us) that Herb's relationship to art is intuitive, that this is both his talent and his pleasure: "he [Herb] points at art like a hound." Well, this is one hound dog that knows what he has found. Now in his late 80s and Dorothy in her early 70s, their marriage and partnership is one founded in mutual admiration and respect, a partnership that shares an obsessive search for beauty and the acquisition of such beauty. As Dorothy relates to us, they went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. on their honeymoon and that's where she received her first art lesson from Herb. He was working at the post office and studying at the Institute of Fine Arts and she also dabbled in creating her own minimal pieces (pieces that I quite enjoyed). Yet with their first purchases, they had caught the "collector' bug and put down their own easels and paintbrushes, resolving to be collectors rather than purveyors of art. As feminist sculptor Lynda Benglis tells us, "they were greedy" with a twinkle in her eye, "thank God, they were greedy." The Vogels became staunch supports of minimal conceptual art and their attachment to the progress of individual artists and their work is real, palpable is not sometimes invasive and paternalistic. These are two people who are both fierce and formidable in their obsessive search for beauty.
Sasaki's interviews with artistic luminaries of the New Art movement--Robert Mangold, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (installation artists of the (in)famous 2004 The Gates installation and exhibition in New York's Central Park), Sol Lewitt, Lucio Pozzi and numerous others--is a testament to the influence that the Vogels and their collection have on the aesthetic progress and the curatorial history of New Art's response to and critique of Abstract Expressionism and the over-the-top Pop Art. As Lawrence Weiner rightfully concludes "art allows you to understand your relationship to objects."
Although I found this documentary to be both endearing and charming, particularly in the manner Sasaki interacted with the Vogels, by the end of the film, I wanted to have a more concrete witnessing and understanding of how the Vogels would begin to collect one artist and then continue to acquire pieces for a display of this artist's conceptual and artistic trajectory. If for instance, Sasaki had directed the Vogels to look at two or three artists whose work they had collected for forty years, shown us those pieces, and talked about these objects with greater specificity, their place in the artistic canon of the late twentieth-century would be more articulated, more self-evident.
Nonetheless, their collection of 4,000 works of art is utterly impressive as is their artistic sensibility and their business acumen. And the Vogel are art egalitarians, donating half of their collection to the National Gallery of Art and to museums throughout the 50 states as part of The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States gift. Not only is this an extraordinary love story of two individuals but a love of the ethereal, of a beauty that is boundless, fleeting.
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