IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES
The humanities endowment
by Sharon Hanley Simpson and
Barclay Simpson honors
MURIEL CARTER HANLEY
whose intellect and sensitivity
have enriched the many lives
that she has touched.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Barclay and Sharon Simpson.
The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the following individuals and organizations:
Bobbie & Fletcher Benton
Graduate Theological Union: The Center for the Arts, Religion & Education
Hackett-Freedman Gallery
Harold & Gertrud Parker, Tiburon, Calif.
Paula Z. Kirkeby
Russ McClure
Harry Y. Oda
Hans G. & Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation
Charles & Glenna Campbell
John B. Stuppin
Peter Selz
Peter Selz
SKETCHES OF A LIFE IN ART
PAUL J. KARLSTROM
WITH Ann Heath Karlstrom
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California
Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karlstrom, Paul J.
Peter Selz : sketches of a life in art / Paul J. Karlstrom with Ann
Heath Karlstrom. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26935-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Selz, Peter Howard, 1919– 2. Art historians—United States—Biography. 3. Art critics—United States—Biography. 4. Art museum curators—United States—Biography. I. Selz, Peter Howard, 1919– II. Karlstrom, Ann Heath. III. Title.
N7483.S383K37 2012
708.0092—dc23
[B] 2011022766
Manufactured in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
Contents
Illustrations follow page 96
Preface: Setting the Scene
1. Childhood: Munich, Art, and Hitler
2. New York: Stieglitz, Rheingold, and 57th Street
3. Chicago to Pomona: New Bauhaus and Early Career
4. Back in New York: Inside MoMA
5. MoMA Exhibitions: From New Images of Man to Alberto Giacometti
6. POP Goes the Art World: Departure from New York
7. Berkeley: Politics, Funk, Sex, and Finances
8. Students, Colleagues, and Controversy
9. A Career in Retirement: Returning to Early Themes and Passions
10. A Conclusion: Looking at Kentridge and Warhol
Notes
Selected Bibliography and Exhibition History
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
SETTING THE SCENE
More than a quarter of a century after Peter Selz resigned as director of the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California, and returned to the classroom, he found himself four hundred miles south, seated at a table at L’Angolo Cafe in Los Angeles. His dinner companion asked him if he would like to go watch one of his former undergraduate lecture-class students paint on a large plastic “canvas” while a rock band played. Peter enthusiastically responded, “Let’s go!” Shortly thereafter he walked through the door of the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard into a wall of highly amplified sound. Norton Wisdom, covered with paint, was furiously creating spontaneous imagery, pausing only briefly to transform shapes and marks, erasing here and adding there, in an ever-changing direct pictorial response to the music. The year was 1999, and this was the “pickup” supergroup Banyan, composed of some of the top improvisational jazz-rock fusion musicians of the 1980s and ’90s, on its first tour. Wisdom was already becoming known as “The Artist” for his work with various bands and highly regarded solo musicians.1
For all his support and promotion of the authentic modern art avantgarde, Peter found himself in a venue where he simply did not have the background or information to understand that he was amid a gathering of leading figures in music and art who happened to be in L.A. (and that was generally a considerable number). It was an important cultural evening, but of a different sort from Peter’s familiar territory. He enjoyed a brief chat with his former student’s attractive wife, Robin, who was there with their young daughter, Ireland. Soon, though, Peter indicated to his companion that it was time to go, to escape the noise. But he had gone there, as typically he made the effort when presented with the opportunity, to find out what he might have been missing—and what he needed to know.
When asked a decade later what he thought when he saw Professor Selz enter the club, Wisdom paused a moment and then responded that his former teacher looked entirely “at his ease, comfortable”: “Selz is never out of place in any environment—always at home; never out of his element. He showed me what it is to be a human being, living fully the creative life. For him, art is not just a career; it’s a morality.”2 In truth, this was not Peter’s natural milieu. Although many of his favorite artist friends—notably Bruce Conner and William Wiley—moved fluidly between the visual arts and popular culture, including rock- and jazz-derived forms, Peter prefers classical, what he might privately call “serious,” music. He is a fan of opera, Wagner and Mozart, and the German high culture he left behind in Munich when as a youth he emigrated to America.
Selz had no idea that Norton, sponge and squeegee in hand, was working closely with some of the most respected and admired artists in contemporary music, among them drummer Steve Perkins (from the band Jane’s Addiction) and guitarist and composer Nels Cline, along with jazz-rock violinist Lili Haydn. Nor did he remember Wisdom from the large lecture classes in which he held forth on modern art to thousands of Berkeley undergraduates. Furthermore, he would not have gone to the Whisky, a club he had never heard of, on his own. But when offered the opportunity, he took it, always ready for fresh experiences. Peter was, and remains, ever open to the new and untried, both in life and in art. The fact is that as a teacher, Peter Selz inspired many of his students in ways that affected the life choices they made. By his examp
le and enthusiasm he demonstrated how to live life fully in intimate relation to art and in opposition to establishment restrictions. That was, even more than the information he conveyed, his great and rare achievement as a teacher, and it is the quality that many of his students, graduate and undergraduate, best remember and most value.
Up to a point, Peter was attracted to the bohemian life and the freedom to explore and experiment that he imagined it afforded. Although the penurious side of bohemia held no appeal—he enjoyed owning works of art and displaying them in a high-modernist environment—he loved the creativity and personal liberation, the almost complete relaxation of tedious social restrictions on behavior, that living the art life involved. His goal, more a product of desire than a professional strategy, was to follow as much as he could the example of his artist friends in New York and later in California, notably the San Francisco Bay Area.
This lifestyle could not have been further removed from his academic life and its professional organization, the College Art Association of America. Nonetheless, Peter sought to straddle both worlds.
Eight years later, on the opposite coast, Professor Selz stepped cautiously off a curb on the east side of New York City’s Avenue of the Americas. The great ice storm of February 2007 had rendered the existence of the curb an article of faith, and I watched him attentively, ready to lend a hand. Along with other College Art Association annual conference attendees and participants, we were gamely endeavoring to work our way from CAA headquarters at the Hilton Hotel across the treacherous intersection of 53rd Street and up the block to the next venue. Earlier in the day, the snow-blanketed sidewalks and pedestrian crossings in midtown Manhattan had been almost impassable, especially for those ill-prepared individuals in ordinary street shoes. As an old-time New Yorker, Selz was outfitted in a tweed hat with a brim, a heavy rust-colored topcoat, and a scarf. But he had neglected boots or rubbers. He was, after all, now a Californian.
Selz was on his way to the Museum of Folk Art—adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art, where he had been a curator in the early 1960s. He and other CAA award winners were to be honored with a small reception, prior to the presentation of awards back at the hotel. Peter was to receive the award for the best art book of 2006, and this was surely on his mind as we made our way east. Ready to seize his arm and provide what support I could while myself trying to stay upright, I watched his familiar shuffling gait, now exaggerated by the slippery circumstances, and listened to his labored breathing, evidence of early-stage emphysema. Peter was one month shy of his eighty-eighth birthday, but despite the weather and his physical condition, he was visibly stimulated by the occasion and the company that gathered around him. As is often remarked, his enthusiasm is that of a much younger man. He continues to engage and constantly rediscover his world. With a satisfied smile, he acknowledged the congratulatory greetings of colleagues, former students, and old friends. Buoyed by the energy he drew from this attention, he was entirely—as Norton Wisdom described him that night at the Whisky—in his element. But despite his gracious and humble acceptance of the various expressions of congratulation, an attentive observer might sense that he felt he was getting his due—more precisely, that the award he was about to receive was overdue.
As former classmate and colleague Charles Leslie observed, “Peter has accomplished a great deal. He is distinguished in his field. And of course that creates a significant ego. To achieve at that level you need to believe that you are somehow special, gifted, even better than most of your colleagues.”3 To be an artist, that is certainly the case. Against all odds, more often than not, you must believe in yourself fully, and believe that your work eventually will demonstrate that you are not only good but superior. Peter is among those few art historians who personally identify with artists.
Peter is a creature not only of his times but also of the moment. And that fact has informed and energized his approach to art as well as life. He is, in his mind, very much one of those fascinating, even enviable, creative individuals whose lives and works he has carefully observed and promoted in his frequently effusive writing and imaginatively conceived exhibitions. Though deficient in artistic talent himself, something he recognized at an early age, Peter Selz nevertheless found a way to live the art life. This seemed to be his defining ambition, and it probably provides the greatest insight into the course his career has followed. As his younger daughter, Gabrielle, said, “Peter is a force of nature”—and therefore, as she makes quite clear, is “accountable only to himself.”4
The reception was under way in the cramped foyer of the Museum of Folk Art. A modestly sized group, perhaps forty or fifty individuals, enjoyed wine while conversing and congratulating the honorees—and one another. The bad weather had discouraged some of Peter’s friends (he looked around for his art and politics soul mate, writer-critic Dore Ashton). But Gabrielle, his wife, Carole, and several other loyal friends were there.
The marvelous Martín Ramírez exhibition upstairs excited Peter. Roberta Smith in her New York Times review challenged the art world to dispute her claim that outsider Ramírez, whose extraordinary drawings were distinguished by entirely original imagery, was “simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.” He was, she intimated, as “modern” as any “insider” artist in the neighboring Museum of Modern Art.5 Peter was as exhilarated by the work as if he had discovered the artist on his own. He had at least helped lay the groundwork: his was among the most consistent voices insisting, during the heyday of high modernism and Greenbergian formalist thinking, that the MoMA canon did not represent the complete story of modernist art. He was looking “beyond the mainstream” to understand the depth and reach of modernism. Multiplicity, diversity, and inclusion defined Peter’s understanding of modernism, and his writings and exhibitions hewed closely to that perspective. He was among those inclusive art observers who prepared the way for writers like Smith to embrace artists who operated outside the standard accepted art-historical categories. That very theme ran through the brief statement read shortly thereafter back at the Hilton during the presentation to Peter of the award for the best art book of 2006.
Selz was being honored by the College Art Association as author of Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (California, 2006), an impressive and generally successful melding of modern art and politics, the two main concerns of his career. This moment was in some ways the culmination of his professional life. For Selz, modern art in the service of humanity has been a guiding principle in his writing, his exhibition themes, and his left-leaning political action. The presentation text drew that critical connection between art and life while implicitly honoring his contributions to CAA over many years of active membership and one term as president:
Peter Selz’s politically courageous book is the most recent work in an important body of art-historical and critical writing by a distinguished scholar. . . . From his work on German Expressionism in the mid-1950s to the present book, Selz has placed art in a social and political context. He had never accepted the limitations of formalism or stylistic “isms” as the only means of analyzing art. . . . Art of Engagement is a landmark achievement [that] . . . crowns Selz’s lifelong commitment to the importance of understanding the relationship between art and the context in which it is made.6
While honoring Selz’s most recent book, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in fact effectively served as one bookend to an extraordinary career. The other, German Expressionist Painting (1957), had appeared half a century earlier. These two publications serve as well as anything to mark the journey that carried Peter Selz from his art-infused Jewish boyhood in Munich, on the threshold of Hitler’s ascendancy, to New York City and his assimilation into the American art world.
• • •
This biography, constructed largely from oral history interviews, is intended to provide a variety of perspectives on the subject.7 At the same time, no matter how revealing it may be of professional behavior and accomplishment,
political ideas, private and domestic life, relationships and associations, and character, the resulting portrait will surely be incomplete. Yet within the limitations of this approach, the many voices heard should give a rich sense of the man. In addition, from the interviews emerge insights into the period, the museum world, the evolution of ideas about art, and dramatic shifts in American society and politics.
Peter Selz is aware of himself as a participant in life, and he has managed to create an image that suits him. In doing so, he—like most of us—has ignored or suppressed certain qualities and behaviors. The richness of biography is not just in the achievements, but also in the shortcomings and even failures that are unavoidable fellow travelers. It is this more human story, with the inevitable attendant flaws and self-delusions, that gives authenticity and vitality to an account of Peter Selz’s long and productive life in the world of art.
ONE Childhood
MUNICH, ART, AND HITLER
Peter Selz remembers clearly his first encounters with the art world, events that provided framework and meaning for the rest of his life. His maternal grandfather, Julius Drey, owned an art and antiques gallery in Munich, and early on he introduced his receptive grandson to the wonders of visual-arts high culture (Figs. 2 and 3). Peter was entirely captivated, his world taken over and his sense of who he was permanently formed. It was a world that he was determined to make his own.
Born at home on March 27, 1919, Peter was the younger son of Eugen Selz and Edith Drey. His grandparents on both sides were from German Jewish families that had been mainly in the greater Munich area for several generations, though Eugen’s grandfather was a rabbi in a small Franconian town, and Edith’s mother came from Leipzig (see Fig. 4). Edith had been previously married, and her first son, Paul Weil, lived with his father. Eugen and Edith’s first son, Edgar, was born in 1915, and then came Peter (see Fig. 6). His birth name was Hans Peter, but it was shortened by dropping the first name when he was five and then later changed to Peter Howard for his Americanization papers.1 He was a genuine Münchner by birth and upbringing, and that historic Bavarian city played an important early role in the formation of his thinking and his ultimate career trajectory.
Peter Selz Page 1