Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  The taped conversations were initiated by Thalia, ostensibly to gather material for a memoir of their art world life together. Peter readily agreed to her proposal (though they had divorced almost thirty years earlier, they had stayed connected), and they met several times to do the tapes in New York and Berkeley in the early 1990s. The fundamental differences in their approaches to forming the memoir are evident from the beginning. Thalia’s interest was in their troubled personal life; focusing on their marriage and family, she sought answers. For Peter, in contrast, professional life trumped the personal. The reasons for their failure in the domestic sphere, a central concern for Thalia, were for Peter less worthy of discussion than was his career and success in the art world, specifically during his seven years at the Museum of Modern Art.

  The one point on which they were in agreement was that in the early days—in Chicago, Paris, and even Pomona—they were very much in love. As a young couple building a life together, they, as Thalia puts it, “worked as a unit.” Throughout this long mutual interview, Thalia’s tone is determined and, at times, combative. She is on a mission to understand what went wrong, and to force Peter not only to recognize but to acknowledge the hard and destructive realities of their relationship, especially as it fell apart in New York. Peter, for his part, is conciliatory but apparently oblivious to the downward spiral their family life was taking. In fact, he seems genuinely mystified by Thalia’s harsh critique of their last years together and puzzled by her negative memories. He either ignores, or is unwilling to discuss, the underlying problems and their causes, despite the collateral damage to their young daughters. What on the surface might seem an admirable trait—insistence on the good parts of a shared history—here resembles more a pattern of willful denial in service to a carefully cultivated self-conception.

  What happened to the love, brimming with optimism for the future, that these attractive and interesting young quasi-bohemians shared? Some answers emerge almost immediately as Thalia tries to establish the direction of the planned memoir:

  I see the focus on our life together in New York. . . . I also see a very personal impact that the New York art world had on me. The immense excitement it offered and the degree to which it probably permanently warped some of my better values. I’d like to explore the depth of my hostility. . . . I remember those years as the seven lean years, when you were at the Museum of Modern Art. I don’t blame the museum for everything that happened to me, or to you. I think it was an extremely important formative period in your life and career. I do think it had a destructive impact upon me—and on our marriage, although we can’t blame our breakup on MoMA. I think it made childrearing immensely difficult, virtually impossible.

  Peter’s response is surprisingly neutral, as if he were listening to someone else’s story, agreeing that these difficulties would “add a great deal of interest to the book.” Thalia perceptively observes: “I am, I think, like Peter, very concerned with history—but I’m more concerned with personal history, and he with a history both personal and public.”

  Here and there, the two momentarily set aside the personal element for an interesting conversation about artists in New York, allowing a glimpse of the stimulation that the art world provided. The discussion of their friend Mark Rothko and his chapel in Houston, Texas, suggests just how much they had in common; Thalia recalls: “I saw the last great paintings of Rothko in his studio. I was sitting beside him, liked them, but didn’t have a strong feeling—until I saw a slide of the interior of the chapel last spring with the painting in situ. It hit me like a sledge hammer.”

  Although Peter and Thalia had a common interest in art and literature and what appears to be a lasting admiration for each other’s creative and intellectual abilities, they differed markedly in their respective views of matrimony and the obligations of childrearing. Both agreed that they were lacking as parents, but Thalia more than Peter seemed to take the deficiency seriously. This comes into painful relief as their taped conversation proceeds, growing ever more candid. At one point, Thalia asks Peter what it was like being a husband and father during their time in New York; his answer probably reveals more than he intended: “The museum really occupied my time; it was the focus of my life. Not being home many nights during the week—I must have been writing then— and on the weekends. During the day I was in my office, running my department. That must have been very, very difficult for you. In the evening, I worked on writing. So wrapped up in my work—but that isn’t so different from all these artists we’ve been talking about. They led the same kind of lives with wives and children.”

  Thalia then confronts Peter directly on his role in their failed family: “One thing occurs to me. I don’t think we had a life together, after a certain time.” Peter, seemingly shocked by the harsh judgment, murmurs, “Oh, my God.” Thalia is not in a mood to be dissuaded: “You lived there at 333 [Central Park West], we went out together in New York, went to parties. . . . There is, should be, a family bonding that creates a unit. We were a dysfunctional family. We didn’t know how to put together a working unit—except for the two of us. . . . It didn’t really work when we had kids.”

  Thalia’s Greek American family may have been, to use her own term, crazy, but they managed to work together. And she wonders if maybe she did not want to replace that family unit with another, thereby almost guaranteeing failure. Peter’s sympathetic response reinforces what we already know of his Munich childhood: “That’s a great contrast to my family. . . . Hadn’t thought about it in that way, but maybe that was responsible. I really did not have a close family unit. So I did not know how to recreate a family of my own. In Munich the German youth group took center stage—our labor Zionist group getting ready to go to Palestine. That was the center of my life—certainly not home, certainly not school. Neither of them was important.”

  Peter professes a considerable fondness for Thalia’s father, so it comes almost as a shock that the otherwise liberal father-in-law at first had difficulty accepting a Jew as his daughter’s husband. Thalia’s younger brother, Dion, describes the situation: “My father, Nicholas D. Cheronis, was a political radical and was in no way ever considered to be anti-Semitic. But when Thalia announced her engagement to Peter, he went into the basement (we had a study down there) and sulked for three days. Unusual behavior for him, as he was anything but silent about anything. He and Peter eventually became quite close, but I think that the original jolt that his daughter was marrying a Jew was a bit too much for him.”39

  And so it went—Peter always trying to put the happiest construction, or at least the less damaging one, on indiscretions and related lapses. Peter has his own views as to what ended the marriage:

  After all these years, seventeen we were together, I think in a way that the marriage had just run its course. We felt very separate from one another. And I must say, Thalia was more interested in—Gaby and Tanya can tell you—writing than her family, her children, her husband. Writing was always first in her life. And in my case I was more interested in my career. And then also I had a very heated affair with Norma [second wife-to-be]. She was married and I was married; she was married to a New York lawyer named Spiegel. . . . Norma represented a new kind of excitement. She was getting her master’s at the Institute of Fine Arts in art history. So we talked a lot. We had that in common, although she never did much with it. She was pretty and bright.40

  When asked if he viewed Norma as a means to escape what was becoming a boring, even stifling marriage, he responded emphatically: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly . . . I took a big step which I regretted very much. One reason I divorced Norma [each claims to have divorced the other after two years of marriage] was that I wanted to get back with Thalia. . . . But it didn’t work. The same problems were still paramount.”41 Norma’s account has it the other way around: she left him.42

  Peter is straightforward about his views regarding marriage and family responsibilities. He readily confides that “basically I’m not mo
nogamous. Very few of us are, although we try.”43 Peter believes that the freedom and independence to pursue personal interests is a reasonable position and, if accepted by both partners, can bring about a kind of bohemian domestic utopia: “A shared life, shared interests, a shared family with your kids, these things come first. The physical—a sex partner for one night isn’t very different from a tennis game. It’s a physical experience, sometimes with no more significance than a game of tennis. And in many cases I think this is nice, and why not? I made a big distinction between loyalty and possessiveness.”44

  There was, however, another complication in this ill-starred marriage, and it effectively deprives Thalia of much of the injured spouse role. In terms of adultery, within the Selz union there seems to have been plenty to go around. Thalia had her own share of lovers during the married years, beginning at least as early as Pomona.45

  As for daughters Tanya and Gaby, one event very early in their lives demonstrated the degree to which Peter and Thalia were either unprepared or unwilling to be effective parents. Peter recalls the incident thus:

  What happened was this. The family, including Thalia’s parents, rented a house in Northern Italy for the summer [1960]. The six of us were living in this house. And my father-in-law simply could not stand the fact that Tanya never stopped crying. You know, as a father it was bad enough, but for somebody else it was very difficult. And a neighbor said, “Why don’t you send her to a kinderheim in the Alps, where they are taken care of very nicely.” And that’s what we did. . . . I was working on the Futurist show for MoMA. We left them in Innsbruck and rented a car and went as far as Rome. Gaby thought Thalia was nearby and writing. That was only part of the time. It was more a combination of working on the exhibition and sightseeing. But she remembers it that way because Thalia frequently put her writing ahead of her children.46

  Although he calls the kinderheim a “terrible mistake,” Peter’s version of the debacle reveals an unawareness of his daughters’ feelings of abandonment, which are clearly expressed in their interview accounts and in Gaby’s unpublished work of autobiographical fiction, “Rush.”47

  In fairness, it can be said that each of the Selz girls has her own happy memories of their father during the difficult New York years. Tanya remembers especially that Peter escorted them to Broadway shows: “Dad loved musicals, and sometimes he would take us with him.”48 And Gabrielle recalls excursions with him to museums and galleries, a practice they continue to this day when he visits New York or she the San Francisco Bay Area.49 Gaby makes it clear that she did not think of her parents’ behavior toward her and her sister as cruel or intentionally hurtful: “People are imperfect and their love is imperfect. But I have always felt loved by both my parents.”50 That at least seems to be an improvement over Peter’s own childhood memories, and possibly Thalia’s in some respects as well.

  Thalia’s fundamental affection for the girls is expressed in a newsy 1964 letter to Peter (who was in Europe primarily on museum business), part of a numbered series in which she tried to talk him out of moving the family to California: “The cards from Ravenna were lovely and they moved me, remembering. What sillies we were. How we fought! And we were so pretty. Remember how pretty we were? Our girls are pretty now. They are making you swimming pools out of old watercolors of theirs. . . . Please be amazed. They were very eager to make you a present. Their own idea.”51

  Shortly after these cajoling letters were written, the Selzes seemed to be enjoying getting out and about together in New York. One example from Thalia’s journal reports an amusing incident they witnessed at an art world event:

  At a party in honor of Marcel Duchamp the night of his opening at Cordier Ekstrom. We come up with Dalí and Gala. The girl behind the desk in the foyer recognizes P. and hands us our packet, containing catalogue, invitation signed by Duchamp, etc. Then she asks Dalí to identify himself.

  Dalí (sputtering): “But I am Dalí!”

  Girl (deadpan): “Your full name, please?”

  One side of those waxed mustachios works up a good 3 inches in outrage and embarrassment, but he finally has to submit to a formal identification in order to pick up his packet.52

  Now that Thalia was getting into the swing of the lively New York social scene, California had come along to threaten her. And this after a period when she felt her life was being ruined by Manhattan and even MoMA (Peter’s job).53 Her letters to Peter that summer of 1964 vacillated between petulant complaints about the inferiority of California to coquettish musings on American culture:

  Don’t tell me about the one-week runs of “everything” in S.F. I saw the theatre announcements and you didn’t. Ugh! I just can’t bear the thought that I’ve just managed to get out into NY and now you want to move me 3000 miles away from it. IT’S JUST NOT FAIR!54

  By the way, are there naked bosoms on the Riviera???? Bonwit’s and Bergdorf’s are both shocked and won’t carry the [Rudi Gernreich] “topless” suits. One store in town does, but where are the suits worn!!!! It’s too funny because all you have to do would be to wear the bottom of a bikini or short shorts and let it go at that. . . . Honestly, this country!55

  By 1965, Peter’s domestic life was undone, and he and Thalia divorced. With her own divorce papers, Norma Spiegel provided him what he imagined to be a less encumbered situation and a fresh start: “We decided we loved each other . . . then we moved to Berkeley. And she bought a big house on Indian Rock with an acre of land.”56 Thalia said at one point in the tapes, “Peter loves change—always moving on to something else.” Although that solution did not last long, it was part of a pattern: discarding the present wife—or job—and expectantly moving on to the next thing, often (again, his own assessment) with inadequate thought for ramifications and consequences.57

  Peter Selz had worn out his welcome at MoMA and in younger corners of the New York art world as well as at home. But an attractive position was waiting for him across the country—as director of the University Art Museum at Berkeley. He departed New York City with his professional life still intact and a new life ahead of him.

  SEVEN Berkeley

  POLITICS, FUNK, SEX, AND FINANCES

  Selz arrived in Berkeley in 1965 as something of a star. Everyone in the art community knew that he came from the Museum of Modern Art, and with those credentials and a record of including Californians in important exhibitions such as New Images of Man, a great deal was expected of him. There is every indication that he relished both the challenge and the attention that came with the high expectations. His goal was to “bring new light to the art of the past and be on the cutting edge of the new.”1

  In the early 1960s, California was barely recognized by the New York–centric art world. Nonetheless, in 1963 a New York painter, Hans Hofmann, who had been invited in 1931 to come from Germany and teach at Berkeley for a year, promised a gift of forty-five paintings and $250,000 to the University of California at Berkeley for a new museum. That promise led to the founding of the University Art Museum, and it set Peter Selz on the final journey of his immigration story:

  Walter Horn [one of the founders of Berkeley’s art history department] had come to New York several times to persuade me to make the move. . . . The plans were to build a big museum, and they needed someone to run it. I would become a tenured faculty member and director of the new museum, a $5 million project. I thought about it for a year—back and forth, back and forth. It was a tempting proposition, which I then accepted. They were going to form a collection and fund it properly. And there were other very tempting things. First, there was moving from being a curator to museum director. There was the whole idea of going to California—I had enjoyed my life at Pomona very much. I liked California, and I admired the university a great deal. They said they would start out the first year with at least a million dollars for acquisitions. And the idea of getting away from involvement with only modern art to running one that covered all of Western and Oriental art—to start a museum from scratch—appeal
ed very much.2

  Peter did not, however, have to start completely “from scratch.” The university had a small collection and used as an art gallery the powerhouse designed in 1904 by architect John Galen Howard. It had been made obsolete by greater demand for power in the 1920s, but in 1934 the Romanesque building became the university’s Powerhouse Gallery. So, although the new structure for the University Art Museum was awaiting funding, its new director did have an arena for exhibitions.

  Another attraction for Peter at Berkeley was the political excitement around Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, about which people in New York had heard a great deal.3 Unfortunately, that was also one of the main campus developments that interrupted the flow of funds for the museum. No sooner had Selz arrived than he was told, “Well, we may not even be able to build the museum, but now you’re a tenured professor—we’ll just have to wait for the funds.”4 Selz discovered that some of the trustees of the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA]) were concerned about perceived competition for patrons. His first task, therefore, was to solidify support, which he was able to do with the crucial help of UC president Clark Kerr. The building proceeded, with the innovative design by Mario Ciampi and associates Richard Jorasch and Ronald Wagner intact; construction began in 1967 and was completed in late 1970 (see Fig. 16).5 But the million dollars a year for acquisitions never did materialize.

  Despite these disappointments and delays, or perhaps because of them, Selz was determined to maintain his contacts with New York artists. Among them was Mark Rothko, with whom Peter and his new wife, Norma (curiously renamed Nora by her husband), visited Italy in the summer of 1966 (see Fig. 17). They met up in Rome and then drove to Florence, at Rothko’s request, to see again the transcendent Fra Angelico frescoes. As Peter recalled,