Where are the Vogels of the 21st Century ?

   Herb and Dorothy Vogel amassed one of the largest art collections ever. When you look at the amount of artwork and the names attached to that work you would expect the Vogels to be multimillionaires or even billionaires but they were anything but wealthy. Herb and Dorothy were both civil servants in New York City where Herb worked as a mail sorter for the postal service and Dorothy was a librarian. They lived and stored their massive art collection of over 4000 pieces in a small one bedroom apartment in East New York where their only luxury items were their cats and turtles.

 Living off of Dorothy's pay as a librarian the used Herb's pay to purchase art. Shocking is that Herb never made more than $23,000 a year. On a weekly basis they visited galleries and artist studios looking for art to purchase and un-like today with so called collectors they got in on the ground floor with most of the artists with a lot of those artists claiming that the Vogels helped their rise in the art world. In the end they donated most of their collection to the National Gallery of Art because they never sell the art in their collection and its free for visitors. The rest of their collection was donated to museums in all 50 states. The Vogels could have easily sold their collection for millions but they were never collecting art for the money. They were true patrons and collectors who sacrificed a lot for their love of art but both wouldn't say they sacrificed anything for their passion.

  Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century and I've had countless moronic conversations with so called serious art collectors who talk a good game but that's about it. Their endless excuses on why they can't buy a piece of art ranges from their daily Starbucks habit, the new iPhone is out, to I need my 3 or 4 vacations a year. I often tell them to research or watch the documentary on the Vogel's and then get back to me. None have, so where today are the real collectors with a passion first for art and everything else is secondary ?

Herb and Dorothy Documentary