Dorothy Vogel, Librarian With a Vast Art Collection, Dies at 90

Arts|Dorothy Vogel, Librarian With a Vast Art Collection, Dies at 90

Dorothy Vogel, a librarian who, with her postal-clerk husband, Herbert, bought thousands of works from future art stars like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, stashing them in their cramped one-bedroom New York apartment and eventually handing over the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art without ever turning a profit, died on Nov. 10 in Manhattan. She was 90.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Kathryn Obler, a cousin. Ms. Vogel left no immediate survivors.

That the Vogels, who were modest in dress and bearing, would come to take their place as benefactors alongside Rockefellers and Mellons was every bit as unlikely as it was that some of the works they collected — like the tiny snippet of frayed rope by the Post-Minimalist artist Richard Tuttle — would land in one of the world’s premier art museums, alongside Vermeers and Van Goghs.

Throughout their decades as collectors, Ms. Vogel worked at the Brooklyn Public Library as a reference librarian, and Mr. Vogel, a high school dropout from Harlem, did the night shift at a post office sorting mail. Their formal training in art, such as it was, consisted of the art classes Mr. Vogel took at New York University as a young man and a few painting lessons the couple took together.

Their rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side functioned as a fine-art storage locker as well as an exhibition space. Stacked on the floor and crammed into closets were some 4,000 works by luminaries like the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; the photographers Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson; the German sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys; the Minimalist Robert Mangold; and the video art pioneer Nam June Paik.

The couple did have their limits, however. Contrary to art-world legend, “we never kept art in our oven,” Ms. Vogel said in a 1992 interview with The New York Times. “We didn’t set out to live bizarrely.”