Their regular visits to museums, galleries, and artists' studios attuned them to the avant-garde, minimalists such as Richard Tuttle and conceptualists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They decided to live on Dorothy's salary and to use Herb's to buy small works from these and other vanguardists, lining every inch of their one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment with more than 4,000 small works by those who would become big artists.
Megumi Sasaki's convivial Herb and Dorothy is both a double-portrait of the diminutive couple, now in their 90s and 80s, and a sketch of the art, and artists, collected by these vest-pocket Rockefellers.
While Sasaki's film succeeds in conveying the collectors' enthusiasm for the new and the difficult in art, it does not fully communicate what the keen-eyed couple saw in the work they collected.
The film's takeaway message is bracing: Where most collectors see art as much as an investment as a passion, not so the Vogels, who did not, strictly speaking, sell their collection. What they did with it makes this bighearted movie an inspiration.
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey
at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.
Read her blog, "Flickgrrl," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/flickgrrl.
