Herbert and Dorothy Vogel

In an article published on Wednesday in the International Herald Tribune titled “The Impoverished Connoisseurs,” longtime art and auction correspondent Souren Melikian recalls an era that lasted from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, when European art buyers “who went in for small Medieval objects, antiquities and the rest did so because they wanted to live with them, not because they looked for tokens of social status or clever investments.”