Maybe you have a poster hanging on the wall in the dorm room. Maybe you have a few pieces of art decorating your suite. Maybe you have 2,000 works of art crammed into your apartment. Probably not.
To the average person, an apartment bursting to the brim with art sounds slightly absurd.
First off, art is expensive. Besides that, apartments are usually quite small.
This didn’t stop Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. For them, an apartment literally packed with art became the norm. Their apartment displayed art on all the walls, art in the bathrooms, art under the beds and art on the ceilings, said Anne El-Omami, deputy director for museum collection and programs at the Joslyn Art Museum.
It’s this enormous collection of art, however, that made it possible for the Joslyn Art Museum to receive 50 pieces of art from the National Gallery of Art’s “Fifty Works for Fifty States” gift program. The exhibit is on display at the Joslyn until Dec. 13.
The Vogels started out as an ordinary couple with an extraordinary hobby. Herbert was a postal worker and Dorothy was a librarian in Brooklyn, N.Y. After visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. during their honeymoon, the couple became interested in the New York City art scene. Realizing that their own artistic talent would get them nowhere in the long run, they decided to “support the genius they saw in their friends,” El-Omami said. It was at this point that the Vogels began to collect their friends’ art, the art that eventually became part of the “Fifty Works for Fifty States” collection.
The Vogels’ 4,000 piece collection was initially given to the National Gallery of Art. Of these 4,000, 832 were donated. The rest were purchased by the National Gallery. Since the Gallery did not have room to keep the entire collection, the “Fifty Works for Fifty States” gift program was set up to distribute 2,500 of these works across the country.
Through the program, selected art institutions in each of the 50 states were given 50 works from the collection. The Joslyn Art Museum was the selected institution in Nebraska.
“Everybody’s really pleased that the [Joslyn was] selected by the Vogels as an art museum that would receive a part of their collection,” El-Omami said. “It’s a huge addition to our collection.”
El-Omami described the exhibit as a collection of “contemporary art.” The artists all lived in the United States at some point in their lives, and many of them are still living, El-Omami said. Many of the pieces in the collection show plans or sketches showing how artists “conceptualize a work of art,” El-Omami said.
Amy Rummel, Joslyn’s director of communications, said the exhibit is of interest to students because it gives them “a chance to see some modern and contemporary art.”
Also, it’s a reminder that art can be a great investment regardless of age, Rummel said.
The exhibit includes what “might not have been the best example of an artist’s work,” Rummel said, but it allows students to realize that “even the greatest artists don’t just sit down and pump out masterpieces without putting a lot of work into it.”
One piece, “Now” by Hans Jürgen, shows the two world trade towers in the background, with a mess of newspapers in the front. El-Omami described the work as “apocalyptic,” since it almost seems to foretell the horrific events of Sept. 11.
Not all of the works are so serious, however. Another work in the collection, “Herbie’s Reject,” a watercolor by American-born artist Richard Tuttle, was named as a result of Herbert Vogel’s unfavorable reaction to the piece. Additionally, a notebook sketch by Michael Lash includes 30 tiny sketches of various things on one page and is entitled, “Thirty Drawings: some quite good but I don’t know which ones.”
“It’s an enormous gift [the Vogels] are giving to the United States,” Rummel said.