Several years back a brilliant play by Yasmina Reza was making the rounds of theatres all over the world. Its title was Art, and it was about a man who had purchased a wonderful modernist painting, hung it on a wall, and invited two friends over to admire his discovery. What they saw was a framed canvas painted completely white. What the audience saw was a comic dissertation on the nature of art as the friends tried to make the painting's owner aware that the emperor wore no clothes.
Herb and Dorothy Vogel have become celebrated as passionate collectors of modern art. On one of the walls of their cramped Manhattan apartment, filled with books and boxes and cats and fish and turtles and sculptures and mobiles and drawings and paintings, there are two framed canvases painted completely white. As Dorothy's sister-in-law comments in the documentary, Herb and Dorothy, now available on DVD, it looks like a polar bear walking in a snow storm. A comment, she adds, Dorothy didn't much care for, and more than likely Herb didn't either. 
Because where a sister-in-law and perhaps you and I could see nothing but a white canvas, Herb and Dorothy could see art. And they could see it in the '60s and the '70s, early on in a period when they were among the very few who could.
What Magumi Sasaki's film illustrates is how two people with some knowledge and a great deal of passion who know what they like and are prepared to go after it can still, even in these inflated times, find a way to do great things. On the surface, the Vogels would seem unlikely candidates for celebrity in the sophisticated environment of the art gallery, the museum, and the pricey auction house. Tiny, munchkin-like cherubs now grown old and, at least in Herb's case, somewhat feeble, they would seem out of place at art show openings among the 'beautiful' people. He was a postal worker; she a librarian. They both look like they'd be more at home in front of a television set with a glass of tea or a bowl of chicken soup. But that would be a stereotypical cliché and if there is one thing the Vogels are not, it is cliché.
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