Archive: Post-Minimalist Vogel Donation to NOMA, NOLA Defender March 2012

 

The documentary Herb and Dorothy, directed by Megumi Sasaki and released in 2008, opens with busy New York streets and quick shots of PaceWildenstein Gallery in Manhattan, a well-known bastion of contemporary art founded in the 1960s. In the next shot, two hunched figures, a man and a woman both in their 70s, emerge toward the street from the back seat of a taxi.  Their backs are then turned toward the camera as they approach the gallery doors, and the man mutters, “Oh, it’s crowded already.” That tinge of aggravation sensed in his tone is really the tremble of excitement.  In the next shot from the interior of the gallery, this man exclaims from his seat amidst crowding figures, “It’s extraordinary!”

 The couple is Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, perhaps the greatest collectors of art from the 1960s in the United States.  In the documentary, the Vogels and the artists whose art formed their collection – currently approximated at more than 4,000 works - explain how they amassed it, once crammed into their tiny New York apartment.  The film also explains the provenance of the objects from their collection that are now part of the holdings at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

After marrying, honeymooning in Washington, D.C. , and visiting the National Gallery in the early 1960s, their interests in art brought them to painting classes at NYU. They decorated their apartment with their own works. But, they also started slowly collecting from other artists. According to the documentary, Herb knew the crowd at the Cedar Tavern, that famed hangout of the abstract expressionists. New York’s art scene had grown into a rich, heroic state since the fame of the 40s and 50s. But, other forms were emergent.  Artists moved past the formal issues of Ab-Ex and the modern emphasis on surface, plasticity, and space that marked Minimalism in the 60s to “idea” as art’s foundation.  The concept began to govern the object, in turn, diminishing the authority of the object itself. “Anything goes” became a mantra, manifested with untraditional media and visual conundrum.

This new work, often without gallery representation, was very affordable to young collectors like the Vogels. Eventually, their collecting fluidly overtook their apartment walls. Judging their own practice less successful than what they bought, they gave up making and began avidly adding to their collection. Dorothy’s salary as a librarian at the Brooklyn Library in Brooklyn Heights paid the bills, and Herb’s income – he was a United States postal worker - bought the art.  Their appetites were voracious.

In the documentary, artist Lucio Pozzi remarks that Herb and Dorothy “look.”  That intense looking and deep care for the visual experience marks their collection. The idea of sight, and aesthetic, subjective pleasure, dominates the collection as a whole. It is clearly apparent that the Vogels liked to see many things.  The collection varies from a Sol Le Witt piece marked by Dorothy on a narrow wall, to collages by the environmental installation artist Christo, to Jeff Koons’ basketballs, to Acconci performance, to a sampling of Lynda Benglis’ (a Louisiana native) own eclectic oeuvre of two and three dimensional works. 

“Eclectic” best describes it all. This was part of the difficulty the National Gallery faced when accessioning the Vogels’ donation to their museum, after the couple passed up lucrative offers from other institutions.  Managing the massive size of the collection presented another issue.  To ameliorate it, the Vogels developed the program 50 Works for 50 States, also known as the Vogel 50x50. 

The Vogels chose to gift New Orleans Museum of Art , of all museums in Louisiana, through this program.  NOMA accessioned the work in 2008, significantly increasing their collection of Post-Minimalist art, according to Russell Lord, the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs.  The Vogel Collection exhibit currently on display in the museum’s Templeman Galleries through April 8 was Lord’s first project after coming to NOMA this past October. Titled “Making a Mark,” the forty-three works in the exhibit – a sample of the actual one hundred twenty or so objects in the gift - are a summary of the Vogels’ eclecticism, with an emphasis on their interest in drawing.

Tuttle’s work is an excellent example of Post-Minimalism, the artistic reaction against the closed, cold geometry of minimalist artforms, such as Donald Judd’s metal cubes. From the late 60s through the 1980s, artists like Tuttle embraced organic openness, the self, and body in the making and viewing of art. But, economy still reigned. Tuttle’s work is also part of why the gift contains more than fifty objects; several individual Tuttle pieces form one, cohesive piece.

A series of Tuttle’s framed notebook sketches lines the walls of the second gallery.  Tuttle made them during a prolific time in his career, and they are somewhat site specific.  Titled Chicago 14, the drawings are somewhat brutally framed with materials found in that city. Because Tuttle specified the hanging height of the works, they are also performative and ritualistic.  The process is akin to the way Sol LeWitt made his art through the efforts of someone else, following a set of his instructions. Whoever hangs the work follows a set of rules, but those rules can be subjectively interpreted.  The viewer is implicated in the creative process, acting as the artist.

Though he is perhaps the best known of the artists in the show, conceptually, his art is very challenging.  The drawings held within the disjointed frames are really just swipes of watercolor from a brush on lined notebook paper, which crinkled under the disfiguring moistness of the medium. Questions of craft and intellectual depth become issues – what could either of the Vogels, or anyone, find extraordinary about this? But, the simplicity of Tuttle’s drawings is also their complexity.  The artist seemingly offers so little for contemplation. But, with time, and looking, the gentleness of the touch of the brush appears. Formal unities and disharmonies become apparent. And, perhaps most challenging of all, the works question what really makes a drawing  - isn’t drawing simply line on paper?

In the next room, etchings by Richard Francisco challenge the boundaries of line itself.  The sculptural edges of the plates, consciously cut into curves and shapes besides the expected rectangle, form embossed lines that appear only with the right light.  The etchings are vanitas-themed, taking the skull – the penultimate symbol of life’s finiteness familiar to paintings of this genre– as their subject.  Like life, the appearance of the embossed line is fleeting; the skull simply points the viewer in that direction.  The fine lines of the etched skulls suggest the fleetingness of the artist’s touch, much like Tuttle’s brush swipes.  Ironically, the etching process is laborious and time intensive; to create such fleeting lines, Francisco needed an entire workshop of equipment and chemicals, grounds and acid baths, to “bite” these lines into his plates.  The rendering of the skulls is tinged with humor – they grin and roll about the compositions.  But, combined with process and the element of light, their significance is far deeper.

The variety of kinds of line, and the content line can carry, throughout this sampling of the collection emphasizes the variety in the collection as a whole.  It parallels the variety in the idea of drawing itself.  Four framed works by Pozzi demonstrate the authority of line, tracing geometric pathways across paper. Essentially, this is drawing – the point of a pen, or a brush, or stylus across a substrate.  But drawing encompasses much more than line or mark; the juxtaposition of two Edda Renouf drawings with another Tuttle economically emphatically states just this.  Though abstract, the Renouf works are layered and textured – almost loud; the Tuttle between them is simple, but powerfully quiet. The deceptively simple combinations of color, shape, size and texture in these works are viscerally affective. This is part of the impact that the Vogels sought, and enjoyed, in the variety of the works they collected. The exhibit is an opportunity to contemplate the complex simplicity of the collection as a whole, which is the greatness of their gift.