We are considering a new series on the things collectors say with illustrations by Pippin Barr. One of the first that came to mind was, “We knew we were collectors when we had more work than we could hang.” Of course some people know long before that.
Anyone who has seen the movie Herb & Dorothy will have noticed the tricks collectors get up to when the art starts pushing them out of the house. The Vogels even went so far as to remove doors and hang works on the jambs so you could see them as you passed through. When our friends Les and Milly Paris found their sofa being pushed further and further into the room as they stacked works behind it, they chose to raise their entire house and build a gallery underneath.
Another husband and wife collecting team Hans and Martha Lachmann kept a big portfolio of prints and drawings under the couch to be pulled out when interested people turned up to have a look. We even saw a video clip (can’t find it, sorry) of a collector who had moved his bed and all the furniture into the middle of the room so he could hang work on all four walls, top to bottom. Not surprisingly (given the love and avarice factors) most serious collectors end up with homes that look like rooms from the academy, for all their modernist talk.
Images: Top left, Herb and Dorothy Vogel and right John Salt’s drawing Untitled (Vogel Living Room Drawn from Memory) a gift to the Akron Art Museum by Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. Bottom left, Les and Milly Paris’s gallery and right Hans and Martha Lachmann’s living room
