Among the young people Selz encountered on arrival in Pomona were two studio art students, undeniably talented, who met at the college, married, and went on to become successful and admired artists in Seattle. For Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, Peter was both teacher and mentor, and the three remain friends to this day.
Peter played a central role in inspiring Michael to remain at Pomona when he was about to give it up in his freshman year. “When I was pissing and moaning about school,” Michael recalls, “he just said, ‘Well, I don’t particularly like it here either, but if you stay a year, then I will.’ I still don’t know if he meant it or not, or if he just was encouraging me to stay.”26
Michael and Elizabeth recalled the excitement generated by the faculty at Pomona, with Peter playing a central role in their shared memories: “Peter would often hang out with the students. He wasn’t trying to be young or anything, just curious about how the students were responding to their education.” But finally, what seems to distinguish Peter from his colleagues was an almost unique quality—that of not just appreciating artists, but to a degree being one himself. According to Michael, “He was different . . . with this ability to size up the situation and become part of it. He was able to empathize with great energy. I think a lot of the students benefited from this.” To which Elizabeth added: “It was his energy. When he gave a lecture, he wasn’t exactly giving a lecture. He moved all around the room. And he talked and he waved his arms around.”27
Sandvig and Spafford were attracted and moved by the emotion Selz brought to his subject matter in inspirational lectures. But what equally impressed them is that he extended that excitement about art and ideas beyond the classroom. He did not simply theorize about art in an academic way; he applied artistic ideas and an aesthetic view of the world to his own life. At Pomona, the artistic—the “bohemian”—behavior was already in evidence, according to Michael: “Sure, at Pomona he was gregarious. And there are all kinds of stories about things that he did at parties. I don’t know if they’re true or not—but very often they were outrageous. It’s sort of like the kind of behavior you’d expect from an artist rather than an art historian. And I feel that that really made his art history come alive, that he really empathized with the artists—as well as the times and the people that he was talking to.”28 Michael put a positive, philosophical spin on Selz’s “outrageous” behavior by invoking artistic license, supposedly granted by the romantic myth of creative exceptionalism: “I think that Peter did not want to call attention to himself, but more to the situation. He’d be a great performance artist. He’d probably be a great painter too. If he wants to do it, tell him I’ll loan him the paint.”29
Peter Selz’s political views were also evident to his more perceptive students. Sandvig and Spafford agree that he was not as deeply, or at least as actively, involved in liberal causes at Pomona as his friend the anthropologist Charles Leslie was, but “Peter would explode on an issue, and then he’d find something else to explode about.”30 In fact, this political consciousness, which was already an important component in Peter’s private life and which he eventually understood to be a central purpose of art, was something his friends the Leslies could speak to.
Charles and Peter had both been at the University of Chicago— though they had known each other only slightly there—and had both been involved in left-wing politics, including active participation in the socialist veterans’ group AVC (American Veterans Committee), which, according to Charles, the Stalinists were always trying to take over. Charles considered himself more politically engaged than Peter,31 and that view was shared by Michael Spafford at Pomona, though he characterized Peter as “more passionate” in his views and causes.32
In Pomona, however, what mattered more than politics for Peter and Thalia and for Charles and his wife, Zelda, was the small-town experience and an active social life. The intellectual-bohemian qualities of these deliciously unconventional faculty couples attracted and intrigued the students. Sandvig and Spafford recall seeking to emulate their professors in both erudition and lifestyle, and Elizabeth remembers the women’s creative manner of dress, which set them apart from other faculty wives.
In Peter’s accounts of his days at Pomona, the Leslies, who lived just down the block, play a role in happy memories. It was here, too, that the Selzes enjoyed what Peter now regards as the most satisfying chapter of his domestic life. Their two daughters were born in Pomona: Tanya in early 1957, and Gabrielle (Gaby) in the summer of 1958. Charles and Zelda’s reminiscences of those days—and of Peter and Thalia—are warm and generous. Zelda recalls Thalia giving her one of her maternity dresses to wear to the college president’s dinner dance. They fondly think of her as a “sweet, loving person,” an intelligent and talented writer whose ambitions, however, were frustrated by the demands of family life combined with her teaching an English class at Pomona.33 It is easy to see how, certainly for young couples like Spafford and Sandvig, these four were attractive marital role models.
• • •
The only serious objection Peter had to Pomona and Southern California, from the evidence of his interviews, was the presence at Scripps College of Millard Sheets, with his ultrareactionary art views. This is a harsh judgment, but Sheets’s great influence in the region—partly due to his connection to savings and loan mogul and art patron Howard Ahmanson— and his very traditional posture assured a collision course with Peter Selz. The progressive, international art perspective that Selz represented was anathema to Sheets, and to much of the Southern California art community. Peter, meanwhile, was unsparing in his denunciation of the narrow and fundamentally “anti-art” influence of Sheets: “The problem in Claremont was . . . Millard Sheets. He had established a great art empire at Scripps College . . . and he was totally opposed to the two things that I stood for: art history—he hated art historians—and modern art, which he also hated violently. So this was the situation at Claremont and the Los Angeles area. Sheets hated me and tried to get me out. He had enormous power in Southern California, but Pomona College was an older institution than Scripps, and he couldn’t do much.”34
Peter also objected to Sheets’s deplorable taste in architecture, which, according to Peter, Sheets was determined to impose upon the Claremont Colleges during a major building program. In fact, Sheets reached farther. He was a part of a faction that was against the establishment of a separate identity for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “He tried to demolish that. Later on, of course, he wanted to have the design himself, and this was a big problem . . . when [Richard (Rick) Brown, who had risen to directorship of LACMA] wanted Mies [van der Rohe] to do it.” Howard Ahmanson, who established Home Savings and was the great benefactor of Sheets, was on the board of the museum; Brown’s rejection of Sheets caused a “big problem.”
More important to Peter, however, was what he saw as attempts by Sheets to dictatorially impose on students a single (and retardataire) view of art by executive order: “Sheets’s [impact] was really devastating. At that time many of the Pomona students also took classes at Scripps, where [the teachers] had an extraordinary antagonism against modern art which was left over from the thirties. We were doing a lot of modern art shows at Pomona [see Fig. 12], and the students were actually told not to go, not to see the shows.”35
The battle lines were drawn between traditionalism (not just abstraction) and modernism, and the newcomer Selz found himself not just on the front line, but the leader of the progressive forces arrayed against what was perceived as the Sheets-led reactionary art establishment. In fairness, some of the students who later established themselves as professional artists remember the situation as being less severe. According to sculptor Jack Zajac, for example, Sheets did not actively discourage students from seeing Selz’s exhibitions.36
In 1956, Selz and several others—including Rick Brown, who was chief curator of what was then the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art—joined together to counter the conservati
ve forces in Southern California, calling themselves the Southern California Art Historians. This group brought a new sense of professionalism to the teaching of art history in the area. There quite simply was nothing like it before in Southern California. Other members were Peter’s friends at UC Riverside, Bates Lowry, Jean Boggs, and Carl Sheppard. Also in the early group were Donald Goodall (University of Southern California) and Karl With and Ralph Altman (UCLA). They were later joined by Karl Birkmeyer and Frederick Wight, along with Kate Steinitz (mother of Peter’s Werkleute friend Batz), all also from UCLA. “A very, very nice group,” Selz approvingly called it.37
When asked how and why the professional organization came together, Selz responded that it was to give papers, share ideas with colleagues, and try to establish art history in the area: “Art history had never been established in Southern California. For many years we were the only ones teaching there . . . [the idea] was to create a foundation and help each other out, to do things together, like exhibitions. I had some very nice ones at Pomona. One of the first was devoted to Pasadena’s legendary [Arts and Crafts architects the] Greene brothers—the first Greene and Greene show.”38
Peter arrived in Pomona with his trademark enthusiasm for art and artists, a great curiosity about what was going on around him, lack of prejudice, and the kind of mind that favored the overlooked and nonmainstream work of innovators. And he absolutely left behind the typical New York self-consciousness that by that time all but defined the art world.
He put his enthusiasms and ideas to work immediately, giving them visibility at the college through an innovative and highly informed series of small exhibitions. Nothing comparable had taken place in Southern California, especially in Claremont where Millard Sheets’s conservativism still held sway. As Michael Spafford recalled, “Peter brought the Golub show, which was a huge turn-on for me. It was a real powerful exhibit because it had all the energy of abstract painting, and yet it was figurative also. . . . Peter really responded to that kind of work.”39
Peter takes justifiable pride in what he accomplished at Pomona, where he transformed the small gallery exhibition program and established his legacy in Southern California. Later, in an interview for the Museum of Modern Art’s Oral History Project, he described without false modesty these early accomplishments, focusing first—as would be expected—on his exhibitions and his rapid immersion in the local art scene:
I did shows and I ran the art department. I had a small budget and did exhibitions, starting with Toulouse-Lautrec posters. I did all kinds of interesting exhibitions. At the same time I rewrote my dissertation into the German Expressionism book published by the University of California Press. There was a lot happening out in Los Angeles, and I became very much a part of it. . . . All these exciting painters—like Wally Berman—became especially interesting to me. The show I hoped to do was the Ferus Gallery group. Robert Irwin was a part of that. [Eventually the group included Ed Kienholz, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Ed Ruscha, and, briefly, Llyn Foulkes.] But then I also found out that there was one unique thing [geometric abstraction] going on in L.A., which was very different from the Abstract Expressionism . . . everybody else was doing.40
As much as he liked the college environment, Selz was not satisfied to limit himself to Pomona. He correctly sensed that there must be more to Southern California than peaceful campus life. Unlike most of his colleagues, who took pride in traveling more often to London than to Los Angeles, which they disdained as a cultural wasteland, he regularly made his way to the few galleries and various art events spread from downtown across Hollywood to what is now referred to as the West Side. He became proficient in navigating the early freeways and surface streets over the thirty to forty miles required to get him to his spread-out destinations. Behind the wheel of his blue 1952 Studebaker, acquired in Chicago and driven west, he motored along the existing stretches of freeway that were beginning to connect the far-flung communities of mid-1950s Los Angeles. His route from Pomona took him along the partially completed Foothill Freeway, which connected to Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco Parkway, the first such urban highway in the country.41
In addition to the galleries along La Cienega Boulevard and in Beverly Hills—the most interesting of which to him were Felix Landau, Frank Perls, and Paul Kantor (among the relatively few important Los Angeles dealers and, as in New York, Jewish immigrants)—Selz was drawn to the new music scene as well as the classical concerts presented by the unparalleled community of refugee composers and musicians living in Los Angeles. With his faculty artist friends James Grant and Frederick Hammersley, he often attended the Monday Evening Concerts in West Hollywood. Another of Peter’s friends, Austrian-born avantgarde composer Karl Kohn, pianist and professor of music at Pomona, was on the board of directors of this concert series. The Monday Evening Concerts were the extended legacy of “Evenings on the Roof,” founded in 1939 by music writer Peter Yates and his pianist wife, Frances Mullen, in the rooftop studio of their Schindler-designed home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Their historic programs now loom large in the history of advanced serious music. Among the names associated with the concerts—immensely popular with the displaced population trying to maintain some connection to European high culture—were immigrants Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Lukas Foss, as well as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage. The serious music world of Los Angeles was, largely by a tragedy of history, for a brief period unequaled elsewhere.42 Peter Selz and his friends were in the audience of the continuation of this important development in twentieth-century music history. He was the visual arts modernist on the West Coast at the time, but he typically looked beyond his own field to seek out the other expressions of the modernist vision, continuing his natural habit of seeking the company of the most creative people among his colleagues.
Selz’s most important contribution in Southern California was his recognition of what became known as Hard Edge painting. The term was originated during the early planning of the Four Abstract Classicists exhibition that Peter initiated for Pomona but that, with his departure for New York, went to the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art in 1959. Peter recognizes the significance of the show and the counteraesthetic represented by the featured artists, whose innovations, especially in the case of John McLaughlin, still have not been adequately acknowledged in American art history. Seeking to clarify the circumstances surrounding this pioneering exhibition, Selz begins,
I’ll try to tell you exactly as I remember it. I think it started in Karl Benjamin’s studio. . . . I was looking at his new work and liked it a lot. We talked about that kind of work and I mentioned I was doing the McLaughlin essay [an introduction for a show at the Felix Landau Gallery]. And he said, “Why don’t you do an exhibition of this group?” . . . I saw Hammersley every week and always admired [Lorser] Feitelson, and so I suggested to them that we do the exhibition . . . at Pomona. I called them all together in my living room in Claremont to discuss the show. But in the meantime, I was offered and accepted the appointment at the Museum of Modern Art. This was late spring 1958 and I had to finish things up at Pomona, including the dedication of a new gallery building, and go to New York in a matter of months.
So I asked [art critic and art historian] Jules Langsner—who was a friend and as much in tune with these artists as I was—if he would carry through on the project. He thought it was a wonderful idea and agreed. The six of us met and decided to proceed, with Jules taking over the exhibition. He said he could probably place it at the County Museum, which he did. As far as the title of the show was concerned, after six or seven suggestions, Jules came up with a term nobody had heard of, Hard Edge painting. Most people think that is a New York term, invented by Lawrence Alloway. But it came up right there in my living room in Claremont. None of the artists liked it, so I said, “Look, we have Abstract Expressionism; let’s call this—after all, it’s in the classical tradition—Abstract Classicism.” And they thou
ght that was a great idea. Oh, yes, the title was my idea; the show was my idea. Jules mentioned the word “hard edge” in his introduction to the catalogue, which was called Four Abstract Classicists. [pause] You know, maybe you want to publish this particular part of the interview.43
Equally inspired, certainly from the standpoint of dramatically enhancing the collegiate and regional cultural experience, was Selz’s idea to place a mural by the artist Rico Lebrun in proximity to the great Orozco Prometheus in Pomona’s Frary Hall. The resulting mural is called Genesis. Peter recalls that in 1956 he mounted an exhibition of Rico’s work, in which he was “tremendously interested.”
During that time I met the local collector Donald Winston . . . who had come to some of the college gallery exhibitions. He asked if there was anything he could do for Pomona, so I thought about it and said, “Well, if you really want to do something for Pomona the most marvelous thing—since Rico has spoken about his desire sometime in his life to do a mural—is to let us find a place on campus and pay for it.” The three of us met that same night, and the thing got going. We had to get permission and we had to get the wall. Rico and I admired enormously the Orozco mural and so we found a nearby wall just outside Frary Hall.
The president said, “Well, let him bring some sketches to show to the Buildings and Grounds Committee and see if they approve.” Rico and I didn’t want to do that. I knew that there was not a single person on this committee who had any understanding of modern art. And if they liked art at all, it was the Millard Sheets kind, which they saw around them all the time. So I said, “Look, when you hire a professor you don’t ask him or her to give sample lectures; you hire on the basis of previous accomplishments. Here are all the catalogues, reviews, and work that Rico has done.” This was an important precedent at the time, and it took about six months to get the idea through committee.44
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