Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  Stieglitz also introduced Peter to his patron/colleague (and lover), Dorothy Norman, who had helped Stieglitz establish An American Place. Although Peter was working long days in the brewery—it was the Depression and there was no other work—he managed to get several of his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke poems published in Norman’s literary journal, Twice a Year. The boost to his self-esteem and confidence is evident in his proud telling of this achievement and its literary and intellectual ramifications:

  I suddenly found myself in the same magazine with André Gide and Thomas Mann. I was this poor immigrant working in this brewery, and so I just lived for this kind of thing. But by that time I also went around New York to a lot of the galleries and met some of the art dealers, especially the Germans who had come over here, [Karl] Nierendorf, J. B. Neumann, and Curt Valentin. Neumann, with whom I became very friendly, was second in importance to me after Stieglitz. I spent a lot of time there and got more involved in modern art at that point, especially through those three galleries—also [Otto] Kallir. And I was very much in touch with these people, so I got involved in contemporary art on that level at that time, and read a lot—read the art magazines.22

  On another occasion he noted, “Basically this was my context, with Stieglitz on the one hand and the 57th Street dealers on the other—until I went into the army.”23

  The indisputable low point of Selz’s initial period in New York was the three miserable years spent working at the Rheingold brewery. He acknowledges that he would have infinitely preferred a job in one of the 57th Street galleries, as was Gina’s good fortune thanks to Peter, who introduced her to the world of art commerce. The painful irony for Peter was that it was when Gina was hired away from Karl Nierendorf by Otto Kallir that she broke off their engagement. She eventually became a partner in the business, which is now owned by Jane Kallir, Otto’s granddaughter.24 “Hildegard worked in this aristocratic gallery, and I had a lousy, horrible job in a brewery in Brooklyn.”25

  To the degree his brewery work and family responsibilities allowed, Peter managed to immerse himself in the art life with some success. He met Georgia O’Keeffe and Kurt Seligmann, the only one of the Surrealists he encountered at that time. “I saw Marin around, but did not really have much contact then.”26 But his difficult circumstances, above all at the brewery, dominated those years: “I didn’t know what I was going to major in my freshman year at Columbia. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I actually had to take the job in that brewery in order . . . to support my parents. I worked there for three horrible years; there were a lot of Nazis working around me—German people.”27 Beyond the decent wage, there was little to recommend the Rheingold brewery as a workplace for a slender eighteen-year-old German Jewish boy. Peter recalls the situation:

  That brewery job was pretty well paid because it had a strong union. All the brewers were Germans. And the people who worked for them were all Nazis. I suffered much more from anti-Semitism there than I ever did when I was a kid in Germany. There were these big, big brewers. These were big strong guys. And I was the Jew boy. I was put in there by the boss. And these were the union boys whose union meetings were in German. And they celebrated every time there was a victory, which was almost every day, by the German army. That was ’39 and ’40. . . . They’d drag in extra beer. They belonged to the German-American Bund in New York, where they marched in brown shirts, some of them. You know, you could do that before Pearl Harbor.28

  The German Jewish Liebmann family had founded the brewery in the mid-nineteenth century and over generations had experienced the vagaries of political events and their effect on their business. When Peter told the Liebmanns of his treatment, they replied with a philosophical “That’s the way things are.” He was the only Jew working in the brewery, and “they [the Germans] weighed 300 hundred pounds and I weighed 100 pounds.” In the end, the abuse was more psychological than physical—“No, they couldn’t do that”—but it took its toll and Peter longed to escape. His deliverance came unexpectedly at the hands of the draft board and U.S. Army in early 1942. Looking back, Selz remarks, with more than a hint of pride at having survived those three years at the brewery, “None of our colleagues in academia or the museums have that kind of a background, that’s for sure.”29

  In fact, he bears to this day a small souvenir of his tribulations in Bushwick. It is the result of an accident involving two barrels of beer and a conveyor belt on which it was Peter’s tedious job to place beer bottles ready to be filled. Somehow the equipment jammed and he almost lost two fingers. The tip of one finger is deformed because the reattachment was faulty. The upside of this experience was workers’ compensation and six weeks off, during which time he had his first art job, helping Kate Steinitz mount an exhibition of refugee painters—among them Fernand Léger and Lyonel Feininger—for the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair in Queens. Kate, a close associate of the artist Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, Germany, was the mother of Batz, one of Peter’s close Werkleute friends. “She was almost like a mom to me in many ways,” he said.30

  Kate was in New York at that time before she came to California, and she put on a painting show at the World’s Fair called New Americans. . . . Many of the Surrealists, well-known artists and a lot of now-forgotten, were shown. And I helped her hang the show. Yes, that was my first experience with exhibitions, helping Kate Steinitz to hang the pictures. We remained very close until she died [in 1975]. In the early forties she came out here to visit her daughter, and she became sick with a kidney ailment and went [in Los Angeles] to the big specialist Elmer Belt. She noticed that he had some books on Leonardo . . . and she talked him into starting this important research library at UCLA. She wisely built herself in, and he eventually turned it all over to her and provided the funds. She became a Leonardo scholar. Many years later I sort of paid back a little by hiring her to teach Renaissance art at Pomona College. So she was among the important people for me—Stieglitz, the German art dealers, and then Kate Steinitz.31

  Steinitz was also instrumental in bringing Peter together with another lifelong friend, Kenneth Donahue, an art historian and docent at MoMA who was, many years later, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

  Kenny was a docent at the Modern. So I got involved with the Museum of Modern Art and spent a lot of time with him. Kate had a little salon. We had both arrived in New York at the same time, I from Germany, and he from Louisville . . . and we became very, very good friends. As a matter of fact, Kenny was the chief witness when I got my citizen papers [in 1942 in Brooklyn]. You had to have two American witnesses, and I had my friends Kenny and Daisy Donahue.32

  Peter had filed his first papers toward citizenship, the declaration of intent forms, as required soon after his arrival in the United States. He signed his naturalization papers, as Peter Howard Selz, on 3 March 1943 at the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn. Having been drafted into the army as an enemy alien, he was “exceedingly happy” (his brother Edgar’s description) to have at last shed his citizenship in the Third Reich.

  • • •

  Selz’s military experience was relatively uneventful. He was drafted as a regular in the Army Signal Corps, but once he had U.S. citizenship he spent a year volunteering for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He never was shipped overseas, and by his own account, he “didn’t do very much” during his army tenure.

  I was in communications training near Washington, in a secret place [Langley, Virginia] where the CIA is now. It was a very strange thing . . . on a hillside in Virginia, and we weren’t supposed to know where we were. They took us away for weekend passes—in a truck with tarpaulins over it so that we couldn’t tell where we were—dropping and picking us up at Union Station [Washington, D.C.]. The other guys . . . you could talk to them about everything, except your past and future. [laughter] There wasn’t much to say. By the time my training was completed, they didn’t need people in Europe; the war was over. Then they sent me to another camp before I coul
d be discharged, for almost a year—in Oklahoma.33

  Judging from Selz’s photos, the high point of his army career and proudest moment as a soldier took place in basic training. Two photos in the scrapbook tell the story. One shows Peter with huge boxing gloves on, smiling and squatting on the ground (Fig. 10); in the other he is standing over a fallen opponent. “In basic training, 1942, there was this guy, and he didn’t like me. He was practically pulling me down. I didn’t like it. And so he said he was going to challenge me to a fight. I had never had gloves on in my life. This was a big, big guy—and I beat him.”34 Another photo shows Peter with the medal he won for “sharp shooting.” It seems that as well as a natural boxer, the new draftee was also a marksman. These achievements, and the pleasure with which he recounts them for interviewers, come as a bit of a surprise, unless we acknowledge a strong competitive streak in this self-described humanist committed to the life of the mind.

  Two other stories from the army years provide a further idea of how Peter bided his time in the military, waiting for his service to be completed so that he might resume his efforts toward making a living out of his interest in art. One of the ironies of Peter’s army career was his volunteering for the OSS, which he discovered only much later was the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. At an army ski camp in Wisconsin, Peter was approached by the company commander, who asked him if he was willing to volunteer for hazardous service. “I asked him what it would be, and he said that he could not tell me more. I thought about it for a short time and, feeling very strongly about the war, said, yes, I would.”35 Times and attitudes change; two decades later Selz was avidly demonstrating against the Vietnam War and the role of the CIA, to which some assign the covert operational blame for drawing the United States into that conflict.36

  One of the more amusing stories from Peter’s career in military intelligence involves a snafu when he and a fellow low-level OSS operative found themselves in Buffalo on a clandestine assignment to test the range of a new transmitter. His colleague was on the roof of a hotel setting up the transmitter’s antenna while below in their room Selz was tapping out Morse code, trying to contact Washington, D.C. Someone had apparently noticed the activity on the roof and notified the police. In the midst of performing his duty, Selz was interrupted by a loud pounding on the door. The situation was especially awkward since OSS personnel were forbidden to tell who they were and what they were doing. Undoubtedly, given the understandable paranoia of the times, Peter, with his heavy accent, was suspected of being a German spy. When asked repeatedly what he was up to, Selz could only answer, “I cannot tell you. I must speak to your commanding officer.”

  When that was finally arranged, the officer checked with the D.C. contact provided for such contingencies and was reassured. The two young “spies” were then released and escorted to the railway station to board the next train headed south to Union Station. Peter seems to have been unwittingly involved, at a low level, in preparations for OSS participation in clandestine operations behind enemy lines in Europe. Radio communication was the essential ingredient in the success of covert Allied efforts to disrupt German military movements, to arm and coordinate local Resistance fighters, and to prepare for the landings in Italy and France. After the war, many of the OSS agents would go on to create and run the CIA.37

  A last army story provides insight into Peter’s ongoing education and the beginnings of his awareness that it is possible, even easy, to outsmart the system. This lesson could be viewed as the starting point of Peter’s evolution into a worldly and sophisticated player in the world.

  Several weeks before his date of discharge, Selz was back in Oklahoma at Fort Sill, eagerly awaiting his release. This particular day he was assigned to drive a jeep as part of the artillery training for which the base was renowned. There were frequent stops with nothing to do but wait, so he and some fellow soldiers passed the time by playing blackjack. Behind him in a command vehicle was the officer in charge, and in the midst of the game the card players heard the command, “Move on!”

  As Peter drove off he looked behind and saw cards dancing out of the rear of the Jeep. He stopped and turned to backtrack and collect the cards. But in doing so he managed to run his vehicle into a ditch. Knocked unconscious, he came to only as he was being carried out of the ditch. He suffered only minor scratches, but the less fortunate jeep was totaled.

  Back at base headquarters, Peter was called into the lieutenant’s office. The cost covering the loss of the jeep, three thousand dollars, was a huge sum in 1943, and of course Peter could not pay it.

  “Well,” said the officer, “I guess you’ll have to extend your tour for six more months to work off the debt.”

  Peter noticed that the lieutenant had lying open on his desk a copy of the army field manual, to which he referred for the regulation regarding repayment in such cases of damage to government property. Peter suspected that if he looked closely enough at the manual, he would find some other regulation that would get him off. It turned out that every GI who drove a vehicle needed a military driver’s license. This rule was seldom followed, and his case was not an exception to this loose practice. There was little the captain could do when confronted with this oversight but say, “Okay. Let’s forget it.”

  For Peter, the lesson was that the individual can beat the system and authority, even the army’s. He took this to heart and never forgot. As he now says, “It’s all in the research. Most people wouldn’t have checked.”38

  The most important aspect of Selz’s military service, however, had little to do with these experiences and nothing to do with the war and his wish to contribute to the eventual defeat of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead, in a way that he could not have anticipated when he was drafted, the military opened a new door for him. He was no longer obliged to return to the brewery. In fact, he had very attractive alternatives that fit perfectly into his longtime dream—all provided by the GI Bill.

  THREE Chicago to Pomona

  NEW BAUHAUS AND EARLY CAREER

  Upon his discharge from the army in 1946, Peter set out to identify which university was the best in the country. With the support of the GI Bill he could aim high, and he decided that the top honor went to the University of Chicago. “Chicago had a program more like a European university; you could go straight to the end, sort of catching up [along the way]. . . . It was a wonderful school, the best university, there’s no question about it.”1 Since Peter had completed only one year of undergraduate work at Columbia, this was an important consideration. “I never did get a B.A. degree. Almost from the beginning I worked on a master’s degree and just had to take courses where there were gaps. I tested out of things that I acquired on my own through reading.”2

  In making decisions about how to direct his studies, he could look to his friend Kenneth Donahue, who attended the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and, Selz reports, already had a position at Queens College teaching art history. Until he learned of Donahue’s good fortune, Selz had no real idea that a living could be made in art other than by buying and selling it. With this new information, Peter decided he would follow his friend’s example.

  Selz describes the faculty at Chicago in glowing terms as composed of “absolutely first-rate people,” starting with his advisor, Ulrich Middeldorf, who remained a mentor over the years and who became director of the German Art Historical Institute in Florence, and also including Peter-Heinrich von Blanckenhagen (classical art) and Otto Georg von Simson (medieval art). Peter went to work in this environment to “catch up.” Then the time came to make the decision that would both draw on his personal past and distinguish him in his newly chosen course. He describes the process:

  Looking for a Ph.D. topic, you look for something that hasn’t been done. I saw there were books on Cubism, people had already been working on Surrealism, and I saw this enormous gap. . . . There was this 1919 drypoint self-portrait by Beckmann [Fig. 27], given to me by a friend soon after I first arrived
in America, hanging over my desk. I was looking at it all the time. Before the war, in the New York galleries—Neumann, Valentin, and Nierendorf had brought many of these painters to this country—I was looking at the Kirchners and especially Beckmann.3

  Peter also singles out the importance of William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1924 to 1945 (he later went on to the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, and elsewhere): “He knew German Expressionism very early, and when he came to America in the twenties he collected their pictures. . . . The Detroit museum was the only museum in the country with a whole room of German Expressionist material.”4

  The choice of German Expressionism as a dissertation topic was unusual at the time: “I was in a field that had not been discussed much. I was in America, where modern art was still considered to be French art—until New York took over. . . . My professor, Ulrich Middeldorf, agreed that I write not just a small-subject dissertation, like most are. He said, ‘You know, why don’t you write—nobody’s written about the whole German Expressionist movement.’ I asked, ‘Can I do this for a dissertation?’ And he said, ‘Why not?’ So it became my dissertation.”5