It is surprising that there was not greater support for Selz’s efforts to create a museum that served not just the art students but the broader university population, the Berkeley community, and even a national audience. Presumably everyone involved at Berkeley would recognize that as a worthy goal for the new museum. It appears that Selz was aware of the challenge to fully engage faculty, as evidenced by his designating department colleagues as subject-specialty curators. In fact, this covered the entire art history faculty at Berkeley.69 How much input they had remains a subject of disagreement. But at least Selz seems to have made the effort. Apparently, it wasn’t enough; as he recalled in 1982, “We didn’t quite see eye to eye. I didn’t have much support. . . . We had the standard kind of internal turmoil, because we all felt what we were doing was so important. . . . I was reaching my late fifties, and there were other things I wanted to do. I wanted to do more writing. I was eager to get to this book I finished just two years ago, Art in Our Times—a book . . . [that] I wanted to do more than anything, and I knew I couldn’t do it running the museum.”70
It was not just his interest in writing that led his to his resignation as director. He was also drawn by the classroom and the students, both undergraduate and graduate, whose company he so enjoyed. In fact, Professor Selz appears to have been famous with his students for his accessibility and openness to social contact outside the classroom. It may be that giving up what had become a frustrating administrative position in a fractious workplace for a full-time academic career was yet another opportunity for escape:
Eventually I said, “Well, okay, it’s about time to get somebody else to run the museum,” hoping that my resignation . . . would prompt the administration to find more money. . . . Instead they found less. In fact, they found somebody who went along with all the budget cuts, and finally almost buried the place. . . . They turned it over to [Jerry Ballaine]—a painter friend of the dean—who . . . didn’t run it very well at all. So Brenda Richardson, [by then] the chief curator, ran the thing. . . . Then after Ballaine left, the museum had no head at all for almost a year [there were several acting directors from among the art faculty]. They offered the job to a number of good people who turned it down when they saw the financial situation.71
Selz’s years as UAM founding director involved increasingly difficult relations with the administration and with at least a few of the board of regents, notably art collector Norton Simon. Simon had encouraged a number of museums—Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, Berkeley, and even the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor—to hope they might receive his stellar old-master collection. But he eventually set up at the Pasadena Museum of Art in a controversial takeover of the building that included the Galka Scheyer Blue Four collection. His record as UC regent was both good and bad, but it appears that he was not helpful to Selz on behalf of the museum.72
The two men also diverged in terms of politics and social values. An event that took place at the time of the violent confrontation at People’s Park in 1969 provides a perfect example:
The National Guard was all over Berkeley. . . . There were planes overhead spraying the demonstrators. . . . [James Rector, reportedly a student bystander, had been killed in the first confrontation, on May 15.] One solution to the standoff would have been for the city to take over the park, and the Berkeley City Council [offered to do so] if the University would deed it to them. . . . Well, Norton Simon was [at the Board meeting to discuss the proposal]. He had [with him] a transparency of a painting by Franz Marc which he was considering buying, . . . and he wanted me to look at it. We made an appointment to meet for coffee after the Regents’ meeting. At the meeting he took out this transparency and I said, “Let’s not talk about Franz Marc. I want to know, did the Regents agree to turn the park over to the city?” And he says, “No.” I said, “Why not?” And he showed me a photograph of this topless woman on the truck and he says, “We can’t have our students subjected to this kind of behavior.” He says, “Look, naked girls.” Now, naked girls are all over San Francisco and North Beach. You can see all of the naked women you ever can imagine, but he said, “We can’t have this on campus, and we turned it down. And what do you think of this Franz Marc?” “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I’m disgusted. . . . You showed me a topless woman when I talked about a man being killed.”73
Events like this one must have colored Peter’s relationship with other UC regents as well. But it was not a dramatic confrontation with Norton Simon that brought matters to a head. Instead, according to several friends and colleagues who were familiar with the situation, Peter was simply not cut out to be an administrative museum director. Later Selz provided his own amplified account:
It is certainly true that Brenda Richardson, whom I had hired and did not get along with toward the end . . . constantly undermined me. Walter Horn [head of the Museum Committee] urged me to give her the sack, but I kept her on as she was a very capable curator. She did expect to take over when I left, but I insisted that the job would go temporarily to Jim Cahill until a new director was in place. The main reason for my move from the museum to full-time faculty was, as I have mentioned before, that most of my time would have to be spent raising funds rather than curating or working on acquisitions. The funding of the Berkeley Museum was never set up correctly by the Regents. After I left, Jim Elliott set up a Board of Trustees, and the Museum began to operate almost like a private museum, raising its own money. This I did not need, as I could go back to teaching full time, which I enjoyed until the day I retired.74
Then, too, there is the fact that Peter and his staff were increasingly, as Richardson put it, “at odds.”75 An atmosphere of frustration and contention, readily acknowledged on all sides, along with the lack of administration support for the museum itself, precipitated his departure.76 There is, however, disagreement about the precise circumstances of the end of Selz’s time as director of UAM. The statements of the two main protagonists stand in direct contradiction, and Richardson challenges Peter’s version, which casts her as difficult and even insubordinate. To her surprise, she was presented with a reprimand listing charges submitted by Peter to provost and dean Roderic Park. Acting dean Richard Peters delivered the document to her home. Peter was calling for her termination. Following his instructions, she provided the lengthy and detailed response required by the university.77 Whatever the actual purpose of this document and the subsequent details of the deliberations of the dean’s committee, Peter left the museum and Brenda stayed. It appears that Brenda was in fact exonerated of the charges by the university, and she continued working at the museum for a year and a half before joining Tom Freudenheim’s staff at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The accounts of these events from various faculty and museum staff all involve what were regarded as shortcomings of Peter’s administration. The consensus is that Peter was seriously out of step with the university administration. As his successor Cahill put it, Peter “was good at making enemies.”78 Of the various accounts touching on this theme, one adheres strictly to the facts of the situation. Jacquelynn Baas became director of the museum in 1988. Avoiding the pitfalls of rancorous personal (and usually unsupported) commentary on both sides of the issue, her brief account puts the events in a larger university perspective: “The ‘bottom line,’ so to speak, would seem to have been the fact that, despite regular infusions of cash on the part of the University for acquisitions, etc., the museum ran major deficits every year Peter was in charge—something that simply could not continue.”79 Tom Freudenheim, a supportive friend of Peter’s to this day, also takes a balanced position in regard to the factors that brought an end to the Selz era at UAM. He acknowledges that he had left for the directorship at Baltimore before the “Peter/Brenda problems arose.” Having later hired Richardson to join him, he essentially echoes Peter’s initial positive view of her abilities with his own description: “I did, happily, bring Brenda to Baltimore, where we had a
very close and productive working relationship. She is exceptionally able.” Still, his observation of her fundamental working style echoes that of her former boss, Peter Selz: “She wasn’t into worrying about making friends or offending people, if her principles were at stake.”80
From this and similar accounts of infighting, one could reasonably conclude that the university had lost patience with the museum. As Jacquelynn Baas recalls, “I know Jim Elliott suffered from this, and I was still dealing with the after-effects some fifteen years later.”81 Regardless of the internal staff problems and differences between individuals, lax financial management brought down the director, as it often has elsewhere. Fortunately for him, he was hired with tenure and accordingly was able to realize his expressed desires for teaching and writing.
Selz’s tenure as founding director of the University Art Museum lasted seven years, exactly the duration spent at the Museum of Modern Art. His friend Richard Buxbaum, law professor at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, sums up qualities that have followed Selz throughout his professional and political life:
Peter is not a man whom administrators can administrate. And as a result, to this day his splendid accomplishments in bringing [the Berkeley Art Museum]—both the building and the profile—to national attention have not been rewarded as they might well have been. And while this is only speculation, I would guess that for the two art departments, practice as well as history, having someone like Peter (and indeed perhaps anyone with a similar “outside” background) come into the essentially self-referential academic world—no matter how intellectually vital that departmental world may well be—also cannot be an easy or comfortable situation. That likely is a structural issue, but some personalities might try to adapt to such a setting—not Peter Selz!82
EIGHT Students, Colleagues, and Controversy
In fall of 1972 Peter Selz closed the door on the director’s office at University Art Museum and without a backward glance strolled across Bancroft Street, through Sather Gate, and onto the University of California campus. Crossing Sproul Plaza, he found his way to his new office and the second part of his Berkeley career, as a full-time art history faculty member. This academic “safety net,” which had been part of the terms of his accepting the museum directorship, was an arrangement that rankled some of his colleagues, and his welcome to the Berkeley academic club was lukewarm at best. There were various reasons for the reservations about Peter, but in one way or another they converged upon his approach to art history, which was object oriented and artist focused. His way of looking at and understanding art was more emotional than analytical, and his anecdotal method of conveying a sense of art as a living entity, directly relevant to individual experience, was viewed by some colleagues as insufficiently academic. Yet this approach turned out to be a major part of his appeal to a number of the students at Berkeley.
Selz’s problems at Berkeley, as museum director and professor, dogged him for years. He was a controversial figure about whom opinion seemed to divide into two extremes. An enlightening view of the perspectives of supporters and detractors alike emerges from the accounts of a number of his students, professional colleagues, artists, and friends. For some, Peter’s appeal was almost charismatic, while others found him arrogant, self-centered, and presumptuous. The challenge is to find the authentic Peter Selz. A good place to start is with his students, those who most directly encountered his enormous enthusiasm for art and artists.
Among the most susceptible to the Selz appeal was Norton Wisdom, whom Peter reencountered years later at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles (see preface). As a student at Cal (1968–73, MFA), Wisdom was greatly influenced by Selz’s lectures and, above all, his exhibitions and museum programs. He admired, for example, the way the art was presented at the university galleries, claiming that Peter’s shows were installed as if artists were sharing work with one another in their studios: “An artist doesn’t need to have gallery walls to see somebody else’s painting. I think Peter was like that: I’m going to do this as an artist who loves art and wants the audience to enjoy it just like he does. Leaning against the wall, salon style, or—hanging from the ceiling. I’m just going to take a flashlight and go into this dark cave, and when it lights up, you’re going to have an experience.”1 Whether or not this picturesque image captures Selz’s practice or intention, this is the way Wisdom remembers the exhibitions at the Powerhouse and later at the University Art Museum. And by his acknowledgment, their impact did nothing less than point the direction for his own life in art. Wisdom’s unconventional materials and crossover performance art reflect Selz’s openness to new forms of expression—ideas also picked up from Peter’s friend Pete Voulkos, for whom Wisdom served as foundry assistant.
Sidra Stich, who was Peter’s teaching assistant in the early 1970s, was especially well positioned to observe Peter’s singular style.2 She studied primarily with Herschel B. Chipp and is thereby able to compare the contrasting styles of the two modernists in the department. When she later became chief curator at the museum in 1984, Peter had been gone for twelve years, but her observations and memories of the art history department and the museum are informed by a career of paying close attention to museums and the academic art world. Stich gives credit to Selz for his programs—not the least of which was the Pacific Film Archive—and for his success in transforming a relatively undistinguished collection into something very respectable.
Along with other museum staff, Stich expressed disappointment at the lack of use the faculty made of the museum as a teaching resource. She had been attracted to Berkeley because of Selz’s reputation as founding director of the museum and his background at MoMA. He was, as she puts it, “a drawing card” for students. But “lo and behold, you arrive and find out there’s absolutely no talking between the two [museum and art history department]. Working in a museum at that point was not considered sufficiently professional. The faculty was moving away from the orientation of Peter Selz and other colleagues to a much more sophisticated kind of art history . . . dealing with cultural and intellectual history. That was not what Peter was all about.”3
Despite his acknowledged scholarly contributions with his book German Expressionist Painting and his high-level career at the Museum of Modern Art, along with the string of important and provocative exhibitions there and at Berkeley, some of Peter’s colleagues considered him lacking in academic rigor. But even earlier, Peter faced the criticism of faculty who considered contemporary and American art, two of his main interests, outside the discipline of proper art history. Men like Walter Horn (who nonetheless was the faculty member who courted Peter to accept the Berkeley offer) and L. D. Ettlinger, trained in the German philological method, were part of an immigrant generation that introduced art history as an academic discipline to this country. This group of academics had arrived in the same influx as the younger immigrant, Peter, but they had been educated in Germany, and many disparaged American postgraduate education.
Furthermore, post–World War II art was still considered the purview not of art history but of art criticism. Herschel Chipp was the accepted modernist in the department, and although he was trained in the United States, he taught from a more traditionally art-historical platform. Peter’s American educational credentials, combined with his interest in contemporary art and his affinity for artists, made him an outsider. The situation was further complicated by the rise of more analytical, intellectual approaches to art history. Among them was critical theory, one of the French-derived philosophical approaches that was sweeping through many university departments, combining such strains as poststructuralism, semiotics, and cultural studies. The Berkeley art history department was conservative in that respect, remaining grounded in archival research, with an emphasis on the conditions, social and psychological, that allow art to communicate. According to University of California intellectual historian Richard Cándida Smith, the department at Cal was heavily invested in the Representations group, responsible for
“one of the most interesting journals exploring the translation of ideology into systems of representation.” In literary studies, this was called the “new historicism.” These theoretical systems were reflected in an emphasis not on objects per se but in intellectualizing them as expressions of ideology.4
Peter Selz did not have a chance of being accepted in that particular academic environment. However, he provided a nontheoretical approach that was interesting to a number of students at the time, even if he was out of step with his department and the conceptual turn in the art world. Furthermore, what appealed to many students, his identification with artists, also put him on the wrong side of the growing rift between artists and art historians at Berkeley, further eroding his credibility with his more traditional colleagues. In the classroom, Selz was seen as enthusiastic but not deeply interested in analysis. This view is generally qualified by an important caveat: Selz loved the art and the artists, and he communicated his excitement to his students. The best of his students, undergraduate and graduate alike, recognized his interest not just in studying art, but in living it—a quality that has been defining and inspiring for students ever since Mike Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig took his courses at Pomona.
Derrick Cartwright, former director of the Seattle Art Museum, is well placed to comment on Selz as both teacher and museum director. Cartwright enrolled at Berkeley in 1980, just a few years before Peter’s departure from the faculty, and took Selz’s survey of twentieth-century sculpture. In retrospect, he feels that this contact with Selz provided the direction for his career. The class was not strictly academic, but it was about where to direct your passion. What made the difference for Derrick Cartwright, and what he says led him to choose art history as his field, was the fact that Selz talked from firsthand experience, which set him apart from most other professors. Cartwright appreciated in Selz what some faculty and students viewed as a deficiency: his refusal to embrace analytical approaches over the art itself.
Peter Selz Page 19