Over several decades and with a modest income, New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel amassed a vast and uniquely perceptive collection of contemporary art. In 2008 the Vogels created a program to distribute their collection throughout the nation, donating 50 objects to a selected art institution in each of the 50 states. This student-curated exhibition presents as a whole for the first time the Vogels’ generous gift to Connecticut, which was placed in the care of the Yale University Art Gallery and includes work by artists such as Robert Barry, Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Lucio Pozzi, and Richard Tuttle. While the Vogel collection has been highly regarded for its Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual objects, the selection given to the Gallery reflects the broader variety of work produced in New York during this period. Featuring additional works from the Gallery’s holdings by artists that the Vogels collected, the exhibition—which is organized around the three formal concerns of line, color, and space—allows for a rich presentation of the New York art world in the second half of the twentieth century and tells the story of the Vogels’ deeply personal engagement with artists.

Made possible by the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and an endowment created with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This installation of oversized paintings and works on paper by American artist Red Grooms from the recent bequest of Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, includes Picasso Goes to Heaven (1973), Studio at the Rue des Grands-Augustins (1990–96), and the great 27-foot-long Cedar Bar (1986)—which will be flanked by 20 large preparatory cartoons for that work, also from the Gallery’s collection. Spanning three decades of the artist’s career, these works represent a lesser-known aspect of Grooms’s oeuvre: witty, larger-than-life homages to giants of 20th-century art, from Pablo Picasso to Jackson Pollock.







Image: Red Grooms, Cedar Bar (detail), 1986. Colored pencil and crayon on paper mounted to board. Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, Collection

Still Life displays works from the Gallery associated with Photorealism—a movement comprising painters and sculptors who took photography as their subject. One of the hottest trends in 1970s art, Photorealism has almost uniformly been described since as a less critical and more mechanical offshoot of 1960s Pop Art. However, the works in Still Life make a compelling argument that the Photorealist trend captured life in the 1970s with a more gritty and melancholy character than has previously been acknowledged. These works merit reappraisal, as the ability of photography to capture “the real” has undergone dramatic changes and continues to develop in unanticipated ways.


Image: John Baeder, Stardust Motel, 1977. Oil on canvas. Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, Collection

Made possible by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.



Image: Francesco Vanni, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, known as the Madonna della Pappa, ca. 1595. Oil on canvas. Maitland F. Griggs, B.A. 1896