Saturday morning my attention was drawn to an article in the Boston Globe about a couple who had just donated millions of dollars worth of art to Bowdoin College. I began to read the article only because Bowdoin is my alma mater. I assumed that the couple involved were rich alumni, or, given Bowdoin's history as a male college until the year I graduated, the husband was a rich alumni. But the story was far more interesting than that.
In fact, the headline was a little misleading; half of the couple is dead. It was Dorothy Vogel, Herbert Vogel's widow and his partner in art acquisition, that made the donation. Their story is truly inspiring:
Herbert, a postal clerk who never graduated from high school, and Dorothy, a reference librarian, used their modest income to acquire an estimated 5,000 artworks that Forbes.com once described as “worth incalculable amounts: hundreds of millions of dollars and climbing.”
The couple packed it all into their rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment in New York. Art filled closets and was piled under the bed and stacked high in boxes; they made room for more by clearing out a sofa and other furniture. Roaming around the artworks were several cats with names such as Manet and Renoir, and they had a menagerie of turtles and fish.
The Vogels ultimately gave most of the art away. But now the Bowdoin College Museum of Art has received a major gift of 320 works of contemporary art from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, one of the most storied and significant collections of contemporary art in the United States. Nearly 70 artists are represented in that gift, including painters Julian Schnabel and Pat Steir and multimedia artist Richard Tuttle.
via The Boston Globe
They bought the art using his Post Office salary and lived on her income. They bought works by artists they knew and cultivated.
“Their collecting practice was very prescient. They managed to get in at the ground level with some of the most important artists of their day,” says Molly Donovan, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art.
So how cool is that?
And they did it all for love, it appears. They could have cashed in for millions, but they gave it all away, except for a few pieces Dorothy Vogel is keeping in case of financial emergency. Awe inspiring, really and I must say I'm proud they picked Bowdoin for their gift. Some small solace in light of the fact that we have Stanley Druckenmiller to live down.
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