Dorothy Vogel

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will receive 50 artworks as part of a nationwide bonanza of donations from New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. As one of the first 10 recipients in a three-phase gift program to be announced today, MOCA will enrich its collection with pieces by 21 artists, including Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis, Dan Graham and Carl Andre.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will receive 50 artworks as part of a nationwide bonanza of donations from New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. As one of the first 10 recipients in a three-phase gift program to be announced today, MOCA will enrich its collection with pieces by 21 artists, including Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis, Dan Graham and Carl Andre.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel's one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is small, even by New York standards. The Vogels themselves are also small, each about five feet tall. It is almost impossible to imagine that they could have lived in a space that size along with 2,500 works of art, albeit small ones, and their eight cats, 19 fish and 20 turtles. The Vogels are unlikely Medici.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel's one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is small, even by New York standards. The Vogels themselves are also small, each about five feet tall. It is almost impossible to imagine that they could have lived in a space that size along with 2,500 works of art, albeit small ones, and their eight cats, 19 fish and 20 turtles. The Vogels are unlikely Medici.

Art Donors: A New York City couple who amassed a collection of 2,500 works by American artists using the husband's postal clerk wages have promised their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art. Dorothy Vogel, 56, a retired reference librarian, said she and her husband Herbert, a retired U.S. Postal Service worker, scrimped to buy the sculptures, paintings and drawings from then mostly unknown artists. "We lived on my salary and spent Herbert's," she told the Washington Post.

If Ripley's Believe It or Not! were still around, Herb and Dorothy Vogel would surely be in it for amassing a world-class art collection on the most ordinary of working-class salaries. "They are one of the biggest collectors of new art in New York City," says artist Lucio Pozzi, "and you would never believe it."

An art historian we know makes buying a work of art one of the requirements for her freshman introduction to art appreciation. The course is by no means for wealthy students only, and the purchase need not be made in an elegant gallery. An antique store will do, or a flea market, or some combination of the two. (Los Angeles, she says, is rich in combinations of the two.