The Portland Museum of Art will receive a gift of 50 works of art from New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The gifts are part of a national gifts program, the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States.

The program will distribute 2,500 works from the Vogels' collection of contemporary art throughout the nation, with 50 works going to an art institution in each of the 50 states.

Artists whose work is donated to the Portland Museum of Art include Will Barnet, Charles Clough, Rackstraw Downes, Steve Keister and Richard Tuttle.

"Dorothy and Herbert Vogel gathered an extraordinary collection of contemporary art, and their gift to the nation is a model of philanthropy," Portland Museum of Art acting director Thomas Denenberg said in a press release.

The best-known works in the Vogel Collection are examples of minimal and conceptual art, but they also include pieces of a figurative and expressionist nature. Primarily a collection of drawings, the 2,500 works the Vogels are donating also include paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints by more than 170 contemporary artists mainly working in the United States.

The National Endowment for the Arts is funding the publication of a book, "The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States," scheduled for release this month.

The Vogel Collection has been characterized as unique among collections of contemporary art, both for the character and breadth of the objects and for the individuals who created it.

Herbert Vogel spent most of his working life as an employee of the United States Postal Service, and Dorothy Vogel was a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. The Vogels began collecting in the early 1960s, setting their collecting priorities above those of personal comfort.

With the exception of the collection formed by their friend, artist Sol LeWitt, no other known private collection of similar work in Europe or America rivals the range, complexity and quality of the art the Vogels acquired.

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