Spotlight on Recent Acquisitions

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection

The Miami Art Museum is one of 50 museums nationwide to receive 50 works from the famed Dorothy and Herbert Vogel collection as part of The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States initiative.  The Vogels selected Miami Art Museum for the gift with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  The Vogels have given or promised over 1,000 more works to the National Gallery of Art.

The Vogel gift to MAM includes 34 unique works on paper, 8 mixed media works, 5 works on canvas, 2 sculptures and 1 screenprint by 26 artists.

Among the highlights of the works the Vogels are presenting to MAM are two portrait drawings of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel by Will Barnet, two drawings by seminal conceptualist Robert Barry, a watercolor by Sylvia Plimack Mangold, two small-scale sculptures by Minimalist Richard Nonas, five works in various media by Lucio Pozzi , a graphite and charcoal drawing by Donald Sultan and eight notebook drawings by Richard Tuttle.  The works by Barnet and Pozzi join other pieces by these artists in MAM’s permanent collection.

The Vogel Collection has been characterized as unique among collections of contemporary art, both for the character and breadth of the objects and for the individuals who created it. Herbert Vogel, 85, spent most of his working life as an employee of the United States Postal Service, and Dorothy Vogel, 73, was a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. As patrons with modest means, they collected objects small in scale, primarily drawings; but they have also acquired paintings and sculpture, as well as a smaller number of prints, photographs, and illustrated books.

The best-known aspect of the Vogels’ collecting focus is minimal and conceptual art, but the donations as a group encompass numerous directions explored by contemporary artists. As the first collectors to buy work by many artists who were then unknown to a wide audience, the Vogels offered encouragement at the start of the careers of a number of figures who went on to achieve considerable acclaim.

When the Vogels began collecting in the early 1960s, their focus on drawing was an unusual one. Many drawings in the collection represent an artist’s initial form of an idea, and others act as plans to be followed by a collaborator in the making of a work of art. This emphasis on drawings adds to the unique and intimate nature of the Vogel Collection, making their gifts an important educational tool for museums. With the exception of the collection formed by their friend, artist Sol LeWitt—a portion of which was shown by MAM in 2006 as part of the exhibition LeWitt X 2— no other known private collection of similar work in Europe or America rivals the range, complexity, and quality of the art the Vogels acquired.