New York art collector Herbert Vogel, a long retired postal worker, died on July 22 at the age of 89, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of cutting-edge Minimal and Conceptual art, as well as his partner in collecting, Dorothy Vogel, who survives him.

The story of the Vogels is better reading than some fiction. They accomplished the stunning feat of amassing some 4,000 art works by artists ranging from John Chamberlain, Christo, and Chuck Close to Lynda Benglis, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Tuttle, all of it financed by the meager salaries and pensions of the two diminutive art lovers. The Vogels rank at the very top of world-class collectors, alongside the immensely wealthy Count Giuseppe Panza de Biumo of Varese, Italy, whose trove of masterworks from the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the late Joseph Hirshhorn, the uranium magnate whose eponymous museum on the grassy mall of Washington, D.C. contains some 6,000 artworks.

Herbert Vogel, a Harlem-born high school dropout and World War II veteran who was better known as Herb to his legion of artist friends, never made much more than $20,000 a year for sorting mail on the night shift for the U.S. Postal Service. Yet that tiny income, along with Dorothy’s wages as a Brooklyn reference librarian, enabled the civil servant duo to live modestly in Manhattan while amassing a staggering trove of mostly small-scaled works on paper that ultimately engulfed their one-bedroom, turtle- and cat-friendly, rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side.

The couple’s spartan philosophy about collecting was fairly simple, ruled by their ability to transport the work of art from an artist's studio via subway or taxi to their apartment uptown. Unlike the current modus operandi of the ultra-rich art collector who relies on art consultants, auction houses, and global blue chip galleries to fashion their collection, the Vogels were decidedly old school, explorers of studios who charmed their way into the lives of then mostly under-known artists who would later become world-class stars, thanks in part to the couple’s visionary early support and unabashed enthusiasm.

For example, according to a yellowed Wall Street Journal front page story by Meg Cox about the couple in 1986, Herb Vogel acquired the only work sold from Sol Lewitt’s first solo in the city at the long shuttered Daniels Gallery in 1965, described as a “tall, gold T-shaped structure.” LeWitt’s friend Robert Mangold helped deliver the piece to the couple’s apartment. LeWitt, who became life-long friends with the Vogels, reportedly urged them to join him in acquiring the work of his friends. It was advice well taken. “Some people didn’t want to sell to him because he didn’t want to pay what they asked,” said LeWitt of Vogel, as quoted in the article, “I let Herb pay whatever he wanted, and he didn’t really abuse that.”