Herbert and Dorothy Vogel

Herbert Vogel (August 16, 1922 – July 22, 2012) and Dorothy Vogel (born 1935), once described as "proletarian art collectors," worked as civil servants in New York City for more than a half-century while amassing what has been called one of the most important post-1960s art collections in the United States, mostly of minimalist and conceptual art. Herbert Vogel died on July 22, 2012, in a Manhattan nursing home.

Herbert Vogel, known as Herb, was the son of a Russian Jewish garment worker from Harlem. He never finished high school and, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, worked nights as a clerk sorting mail for the United States Postal Service until his retirement in 1979. Dorothy Faye Hoffman was the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish stationery merchant from Elmira, New York. She received a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and a master's degree from the University of Denver, both in library science, and worked until her retirement in 1990 as a librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library.

Herbert and Dorothy married in 1962, a year after they met, in Elmira. Early in their marriage, they took painting classes at New York University, but later gave up painting in favor of collecting. They had no children, lived very frugally, and shared their living space with fish, turtles, and cats named after famous painters.

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