from The Moment blog @ The New York Times

ABMB | Meet the Vogels

By MADHU PURI

Megumi Sasaki’s documentary film “ Herb & Dorothy” debuts tonight at The Colony Theater in Miami as part of ABMB’s “Art Loves Film” series. The movie is a sweet tale about Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, a postal worker and a librarian, respectively, who amassed one of the most important contemporary art collections to date on a modest budget. (An excerpt from the film is above.) Here, The Moment caught up with Dorothy Vogel about the fluctuating art economy, dealer camaraderie, and advice for collecting in today’s market.

In the film, you say you collected minimal and conceptual art because Pop art was too expensive. Does this mean your collection evolved out of what you could afford?

It’s true, everything else was not affordable. But, we happened to have a natural attraction to minimal and conceptual so it made it easy to collect. I would have liked to have some Pop but it got expensive very quickly and Abstract Expressionism was out the question.
Rumor has it the gallerist Leo Castelli sold you a lot of your work. 
We bought our Donald Judd from him. He was a wonderful man and very supportive. We did not buy a lot through him though because he always gave us artists’s phone numbers and told us to call them directly.

Did any artist refuse to sell you work? Did you feud with dealers because of your aggressive collecting style?
Generally people wanted to come into our collection, so it was the other way around unfortunately. We never had problems with dealers. I know John Weber said that in the film but in many cases, we started buying before they had representation. John always knew which of his artists we were directly buying from and we never told other people to go to the artist directly. We always told them to go to the dealer.

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