Selz gets directly to the point: “For young painters and sculptors Alberto Giacometti occupies a position apart from all other living artists. His work, neither imitated nor slandered, is out of competition. Like a saint, he is placed in a niche by himself. . . . Although his work, changing relatively little over a period of almost twenty years now, is very familiar, its resources are inexhaustible and the impact of his approach is inevasible.”59 In his introduction, in connection with the postwar grisaille paintings—“out of place in a time when our sensibilities are constantly blunted by the brilliance of fresh and garish color”—Selz presents the artist clearly in just two sentences: “But colors, Giacometti feels, adhere to surfaces, and his problem—the problem of the sculptor as painter—is to grasp the totality of the image in space. His linear painting, nervous mobile drawings, and sculptures of ‘petrified incompletion’ testify to a great artist’s struggle to find an equivalent for the human phenomenon [italics added].”60 Selz’s priorities and values become entirely transparent. As in the final sections of the Beckmann catalogue, the personal dimension is emphasized in Giacometti’s autobiographical statement. Selz leaves no question that the men and their art are inextricably joined.
Selz makes enlightening connections while traveling in his thinking, and in much of his writing, from the specific—artist, medium, work of art—to the general, and then fluidly back again to the individual. The questions he raised about the way recent and contemporary art were understood and presented both informed and determined his most significant and memorable exhibitions as, for a time, he held forth with a considerable degree of power from his position at the Museum of Modern Art.
Figure 1. Peter Selz, in front of Max Beckmann’s Departure (1932–33), MoMA 1964. Photograph by Marvin P. Lazarus.
Figure 2. Drey (maternal grandparents) mansion, Munich, n.d. The Drey art and antiques gallery was on the first floor, residence above, and top floor rented.
Figure 3. Grandfather Julius Drey, Munich (?), n.d.
Figure 4. Selz family portrait on the occasion of Adolf Selz’s eightieth birthday at Hotel Reichenhall, 1925. Peter is in the front row, kneeling; Eugen Selz stands at the far left; Edgar Selz is standing fourth from left in the third row; Edith (Drey) Selz is fourth from right in the third row.
Figure 5. Peter, age six, with his beloved Bavarian nanny, Rosa, Munich, 1926. Inscribed on the back: “Peterle mit seiner Rosa” (Little Peter with his Rosa).
Figure 6. Edith (Drey) Selz with her sons Edgar (left) and Peter, Munich, 1927. Photograph: Müller-Hilsdorf, Munich.
Figure 7. Peter with his best friend, Herbert Kahn, on a stop in the Tyrol en route by bicycle to Italy, 1934.
Figure 8. Peter with his parents as he boarded the steamship Europa for the Atlantic crossing to New York, Bremen, 1936.
Figure 9. Hildegard (Gina) Bachert and Peter, New York, 1939. Gina was Peter’s first love, whom he met in the New York Werkleute German Jewish youth group. Photograph: Hans Oppenheimer, New York.
Figure 10. Peter with boxing gloves during army basic training, 1942. He accepted the challenge to a boxing match with a bully. To his surprise, Peter, who had never boxed before, prevailed.
Figure 11. Peter seated on the roof of his car in front of the Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), Chicago, 1955.
Figure 12. Flyer for the arts festival Expressionism at Pomona College, 1957.
Figure 13. Thalia (Cheronis) Selz and Peter at home with their daughters, Gabrielle (Gaby), seated, and Tanya, New York, 1959–60.
Figure 14. Opening of the Emil Nolde exhibition at MoMA, 1963. From left: Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Gertrud A. Mellon, William S. Lieberman, Peter Selz, Mrs. John Rewald.
Figure 15. Man Ray and Peter Selz at MoMA, 1964.
Figure 16. Peter Selz with the model for the University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1966. Photograph by Ansel Adams. Contemporary print from original negative by Ansel Adams, UCR/California Museum of Photography, Sweeny/Ruben Ansel Adams FIAT LUX Collection, University of California, Riverside.
Figure 17. Mark Rothko, Mell Rothko, sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, and Peter (from left) in Hadzi’s studio garden, Rome, 1966. Photograph by Norma Schlesinger.
Figure 18. UC Berkeley art faculty and visiting artists in Norma’s garden at her Indian Rock home in Berkeley, ca. 1966. Front row, from left: Harold Paris, Erle Loran, unidentified woman behind Peter, Emilio Vedova, and George Miyasaki behind his wife. Back row, from left: Arthur Formichelli (attorney), Frieda Paris, Arnoldo Pomodoro, Pete Voulkos, Norma, and an unidentified man.
Figure 19. Anna Halprin dancers performing at one of the grand-opening events at the new University Art Museum, November 1970. Photograph: Chester Kessler Estate, courtesy of Robert Emory Johnson.
Figure 20. Peter with Sam Francis at Garner Tullis’s San Francisco studio, 1972. Photograph by Sue Kubly. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 21. Carole and Peter Selz, Eduardo Chillida, and Herschel Chipp (from left) at the site of Chillida’s Wind Combs (1977), San Sebastián, Spain, April 1988.
Figure 22. Peter, Hans Burkhardt, and Jack Rutberg (from left), at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles, 1990. Reproduced with the permission of Jack Rutberg.
Figure 23. Peter with artists Tobi Kahn (left) and Bruce Conner, 1999.
Figure 24. Carole and Peter Selz marching against George W. Bush’s Iraq War, San Francisco, 2002.
Figure 25. Peter and Carole in their Berkeley backyard, n.d.
Figure 26. Peter Selz, 2010. Photograph: Dennis Letbetter, San Francisco. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 27. Max Beckmann, Large Self-Portrait, 1919, in the collection of Peter Selz. Drypoint, 9¼ × 7¾ in. (23.5 × 19.5 cm). (Beckmann catalogue raisonné no. Hofmaier 153)
SIX POP Goes the Art World
DEPARTURE FROM NEW YORK
Covering a 1960 appearance by Peter Selz at the Detroit Institute of Arts, local art editor Louise Bruner gave an account of the evening that suggests both the casual informality of such events in the early 1960s and the speaker’s awareness of his role in the art world: “After a few introductory remarks about the forthcoming Futurist show he is organizing, which will come to Detroit, Dr. Selz lit a cigarette, leaned on the podium, took a sip from his highball and answered questions from the audience. The first, from me: ‘Does the Museum of Modern Art create taste because of its great influence, or does it guide and reflect taste?’ Dr. Selz: ‘It is regrettable but unavoidable that we create taste. We are conscious of this responsibility and try to be diversified.’” Bruner described the curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art as, “by virtue of this position alone, . . . one of the high priests of contemporary American and international art.”1
The 1960s, however, brought a dramatic change to the art world, most notably in New York and specifically at the Museum of Modern Art and the commercial galleries, which were forging an ever closer relationship. Despite Selz’s comment quoted above, and a similar assertion by Alfred Barr, the museum’s hitherto undisputed position as trendsetter had begun to decline as early as 1950.2 The emergence of a generation of artists who questioned what was left for them—where they could go with their own art after Abstract Expressionism—is meticulously described in Jed Perl’s 2005 book, New Art City.3 It is difficult to trace all the forces at work. There was a shift from the individualistic and romantic art projects typical of the 1950s and earlier to a more cerebral and structural approach to art making. And there were new relationships between artists, critics, curators, and, especially, dealers. Peter Selz watched with disapproval as this change occurred, and he was more than willing to speak out on the subject. The qualities that he valued in artists and in their creations were, in his view, being replaced by a cynical, superficial, “boomtown” mentality. Even Perl is unable to say just how the change came about and in what venues it was recognized as something ominous for the future of American art. According to his account, everything was simply new and exciting. In fact, it
was exciting, and it was important precisely because it was new.
Smitten collectors, most notably New Yorkers Robert and Ethel Scull, did their part to establish a commercial base for the new art. As the prices for contemporary art rose dramatically, museums such as MoMA (in part due to Barr’s reluctance to embrace the so-called cutting edge) were increasingly left behind. Reviewer Fred Kaplan described the Scull enterprise in 2010: “A half century ago, before the phrase ‘Pop Art’ was even coined . . . Robert C. Scull started buying up dozens of works by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. . . . As much as anyone, Mr. Scull and his wife, Ethel—a fashion plate and socialite whom everyone called Spike—created the market for Pop, making it the occasion for lavish parties, an emblem of high society and the new face [italics added] of art in the 1960s.”4
Critic Sidney Tillim, who started writing about Pop Art as early as 1962, before its “formal debut,” faults the Museum of Modern Art for falling behind.5 He does so, moreover, in a way that calls into question the museum’s understanding of American contemporary art in general, its “internationalist preoccupation,” and what he refers to as “crisis” aesthetics that led to an exaggerated focus on the figure (presumably including New Images of Man in that judgment). The French art foundation of Barr’s modernist canon, along with the Peter Selz–Dorothy Miller figurative emphasis (though it was not a shared perspective), is in effect challenged by Tillim as indicating MoMA’s increasing irrelevancy in connection with current art. In 1965, he wrote that the museum’s “exploitation of Optical Art as an alternative to Pop has to be considered.” He was responding in part to John Canaday, who in the New York Times described Optical Art as the art of our time:6 Tillim acknowledged that MoMA may have recovered some lost prestige through the Optical Art show The Responsive Eye, “organized by William Seitz . . . [and] conceived for the purposes of counteracting the popularity of Pop Art, [but] it did illustrate the difficulty the curatorial Establishment has had in approaching modernist art with anything but an international bias.”7 This hardly seems fair in light of the catholicity of the exhibitions produced in Selz’s department up to that very year.
Tillim’s article goes beyond the Pop phenomenon, however, to point out a general deficiency in MoMA’s relationship to contemporary American art. Although he credits MoMA for a series of “informative” exhibitions about American art—“Indian painting, photography, and even George Caleb Bingham”—these shows, he charged, nevertheless demonstrated a fundamentally parochial attitude toward American art that “seems to persist to this day”:
It is only in the last few years that the Abstract Expressionists have been honored. But among the first of these was Mark Tobey, who can hardly be described as typical; and besides, the present series of retrospectives seems curiously belated. In the thirties and forties there may have been some justification for the Museum’s intransigence. . . . The problem is that the Museum has been ambivalent on the one hand, and aggressive on the other, and has retarded the development of indigenous sensibility by constantly relating art in America to values that over the years have applied less and less to the problems whose issue now simply repudiates what the Museum down deep still thinks is the mainstream.8
By virtue of his position at MoMA, Peter Selz was able to observe firsthand what turned out to be fundamental structural, ideological, aesthetic, intellectual, and commercial changes in the art world. Previously accepted values of art, including the sense that art could contain profound meaning and even transformative power, were themselves transforming under the “weight” of the ephemeral and transitory. Peter, whose career was built on the belief that form and content together served a serious goal, one not touched by a passing parade of “isms,” did not like what he saw. And he was wary of art history and criticism leading the way for art; rather, their duty was to follow, observe closely, describe, and, when possible, explain. Everything, for Peter, started with the art and the artist.
The curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, sympathetic to what was going on in New York and particularly receptive to Pop Art, put his finger directly on the fundamental shift in power and influence in the art world. The lead in the art dance, he noted, moved rapidly back and forth between critic/historian and artist, with the museums and galleries watching and waiting to pick winners and then moving in:
We are still working with myths developed in the age of alienation . . . [but] there no longer is any shock in art. About a year and a half ago [1961] I saw the work of Wesselmann, Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein in their studios. They were working independently, unaware of each other, but with a common source of imagery. Within that year and a half they have had shows, been dubbed a movement, and we are discussing them at a symposium. This is instant art history, art history made so aware of itself that it leaps to get ahead of art.9
The conservative critic Hilton Kramer, though hardly in the same camp as Geldzahler, echoed this point with the observation that “the relation of the critic to his material has been significantly reversed. Critics are now free to confront a class of objects . . . about which almost anything [they] say will engage the mind more fully and affect the emotions more subtly than the objects whose meaning they are ostensibly elucidating.”10
Geldzahler and Kramer were speakers (along with Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz) at the Museum of Modern Art symposium on Pop Art organized and moderated by Peter Selz. (In the audience was Marcel Duchamp, who reportedly commented that Kramer was “insufficiently light-hearted.”)11 The symposium was held on 13 December 1962, six weeks after Sidney Janis opened his New Realists exhibition, a survey of contemporary Pop Art. According to Thomas Hess in his Art News review, “The point of the Janis show . . . was an implicit proclamation that the New had arrived and it was time for all the old fogies to pack.”12 Selz was no fan of Pop Art, and few of the other panelists, with the exception of Geldzahler, were favorably disposed toward the new movement. But the art fashion tide picked up Pop and swept aside the unbelievers, the “old fogies” who’d been brought up in what might as well have been a different era.
Selz had been particularly vocal in his criticism. Writing in Partisan Review, he dismissed the new movement by accusing it of being “as easy to consume as it is to produce and, better yet, easy to market because it is loud, it is clean, and you can be fashionable and at the same time know what you are looking at.”13 According to Selz, Pop Art was a product of American consumerism and drew its subjects directly from that source in a kind of circular process. He missed the evidence of engagement and suffering that informed the great modern art of the recent past, such as German Expressionism. For him, the new art operated exclusively on the surface; it was both literally and figuratively devoid of depth.
The issue of surface versus depth was of great significance to Selz. He claimed to be open to the new, regardless of style, but if subjectivity and human qualities were removed, he had little use for what was left. A 2009 article by Richard Dorment in the New York Review of Books tackles that issue head on in a discussion of three recent books about Andy Warhol.14 The essay discusses what constitutes an original work of art by asking to what extent the artist’s hand need be evident or even required in its production. Warhol’s fame, of course, is indebted to the Duchampian tenet that art exists not in the execution, but in the idea. How the object is manufactured or even if it is mass-produced (appropriate terms in connection with Warhol) is beside the point.
This subversive view of authorship and handcrafted originality remains highly offensive to traditionalists. At best, they would hold, it smacks more of philosophy than of art. In fact, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto seems to agree when he describes Warhol as “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.”15 According to one of the assistants responsible for painting many of Warhol’s later works, the artist’s primary role was signing them when they were sold. A painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether o
r not he ever touched it.16
This practice alone could be taken as a fundamentally cynical view of fine art, and many observers at the time did so. But that was not what Selz objected to most. Rather, it was the attitude that art had no life, no passion—no humanity—breathing beneath the surface, eagerly waiting to emerge and affect the viewer. As Warhol famously said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”17 Influential though this erasure of the artist became in aspects of postmodern thinking, this notion was antithetical to Selz’s humanistic approach to art. And it pretty much precluded any true détente between Selz and one rising current of contemporary art and cultural criticism.
In our 1982 interview, Peter had very little good to say about the situation in New York prior to his departure for California. Above all, he deplored the cozy commercial relationships between artists, curators, galleries, and, finally, museums. There was a new way of creating reputations that fueled the art market, serving the immediate interests of every part of the art scene—except the art itself. Everyone was involved in a kind of new art “world order” in this New Art City.
Peter Selz Page 13