Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  Agnes Denes, whom Peter met in New York in 1975 while writing a piece on her work for Art in America, is a strong and steadfastly independent artist who expanded his thinking about contemporary art. He considers her one of the truly innovative artists working today. They quickly became close friends. He was, in her memory, attracted to the conceptual core of her art. In fact, they seem to agree that her work was Peter’s true introduction to conceptualism, a phenomenon to which he was not naturally attracted. “Peter was probably introduced through my work to an art that he then became interested in. As he says, the ‘conceptual’ part of it. I am a conceptualist—and I started very early, in the late 1960s, when only men were doing conceptual art. Keeping anybody else out. I was doing my own work and I was very much on my own. Still am.”34

  The qualities that distinguished Denes’s art from that of her conceptualist peers are exactly those that enabled Peter to engage with it, thereby establishing his own relationship to what was becoming the main thrust of twentieth-century practice. This is made clear in an insightful—and somewhat surprising, given Selz’s usual enthusiasms—essay of 1992: “Although Denes had little contact with the largely male group of conceptualists, she shared similar concerns with the conceptual artists of her generation. But her probes often went more deeply into essential human concerns. And unlike most of the conceptualists, Denes never renounced the object. On the contrary, her art is endowed with an intensely visual character of broad dimensions and perfection of execution, which is always specific to the particular work in question.”35

  Selz found himself in his philosophical comfort zone with Denes, and in the same essay he further praised her objectives in staying away from the Clement Greenberg formalist rulebook: “Agnes Denes was one of the artists who broke these odious constraints, and she did so in a most unique manner by incorporating the investigation of science and the development of philosophy into art of universal dimensions. Her attitude toward philosophy was different in kind, although no less profound, from the philosophical paintings by artists such as Rothko, Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman.”36

  Like another close artist friend, Ariel Parkinson, Agnes Denes has a combative relationship with her friend Peter. They disagree about a great many artists. She tells about standing in the gallery at a Picasso/Braque exhibition at MoMA shouting at each other, having a “huge fight.” She said that Braque was the more original artist and Picasso stole from him, used it in his work. And Peter said, “Well, no, you can’t say that.” He accused her of not having adequate knowledge of art history, and she “snapped back” with, “I’d rather make it than study it.” By her account, they both laughed.37 But Agnes greatly admires Peter’s curiosity about everything, above all about people—not only but especially artists and the wonderful, exciting things which they make: “He can hardly walk, but he still goes to see sixteen exhibitions. And he keeps going. He’s seen enough, he knows enough—but he never gets tired of seeing more art. New Yorkers go to galleries at the start of the season, then are done. It takes another two months to go out and see something. Peter comes to New York, and he never stops—even when he has problems with his knees, his legs, he keeps on going.”38

  Denes has an ambivalent relationship to feminist art because her work was not considered sufficiently (perhaps politically) feminist. She describes herself as among the first true conceptualists and postmodernists, an achievement that is only belatedly being recognized—as in the 2007 $25,000 award from Anonymous Was a Woman, an organization that supports women artists “anonymously.”39 In considering her career, Denes expressed the importance of her friendship with Selz: “My relationship with Peter is that we became friends through mutual respect, and we have remained friends for more than forty years. I don’t want anything from him. It’s like I’m always there. I was there [Berkeley] at his eightieth birthday party. And I was supposed to be somewhere else, but I didn’t want to say no. It’s just that we like each other, and it’s going to be that way forever. When one of us dies, the other one’s going to be very sorry.”40

  For his part, Peter experiences social and intellectual happiness knowing artists with whom he can form a personal bond. They then become part of his extended art family, and as such they earn his ongoing support as he finds ways to fit them into his world. Agnes Denes is a prime example of this process. In her case, it is accomplished by connecting what he sees as the true meaning of her art, conceptualism notwithstanding, and the humanist figurative imperative of New Images of Man. Two examples should make the point. The most interesting one involves her ongoing project “Study of Dust,” and specifically the 1969 work Human Dust. Selz describes this remarkable piece as consisting of a “pile of calcareous human remains, the residue left after cremation,” and an accompanying text telling the “prosaic life story” of a fictional deceased artist, with all the vital statistics listed in a “dispassionate, clinical” manner. The text’s final words, supposedly summing up the meaning of it all, are devoid of individual identity and life purpose: “34 people remembered him or spoke after his death, and his remains shown here represent of his entire body.”41 The dehumanization of a person in death, the loss of identity, and the “vulnerability” of human existence were themes of Peter’s New Images; Denes’s Human Dust, created a decade later, fits perfectly within those themes.

  Peter says he believes that Denes would agree with his old friend Paul Tillich, who wrote that “art indicates the character of a spiritual situation. . . . It does this more immediately and directly than science and philosophy for it is less burdened with objective considerations.”42 Selz concludes his 1992 essay on Denes with a concise statement of his own—and presumably his subject’s—faith in the transformative power of art: “At a time when objectivity is no longer possible, Agnes Denes postulates the feasibility that art can deal with the ultimate questions concerning humanity.”43 In this, Denes provides for Peter another bridge connecting the two poles of human experience—subjective and objective, emotional and rational, spiritual and secular—between which his personal humanist understanding of modern art travels.

  Dore Ashton, another New Yorker, is one of Peter’s oldest friends. A major part of their bond has always been in their shared left-wing politics, for which Ashton was well known in art circles. They met at the 1950 College Art Association conference. Dore was about to graduate from Harvard and was scouting for a job. She didn’t find one; instead, as she says, “I found Peter Selz.” “I was interested in Peter quite aside from the fact that we flirted with each other. But I was eager to meet him because I already knew who he was. . . . We had many conversations and [then] went our own ways. . . . But we always kept in touch. And then eventually, when he was an important fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and I was an important girl on the New York Times . . . we saw each other professionally—and we cooked up things together.” Ashton goes on to say that “we were very unusual in that [art] world—if you want to call it a world. . . . Very few people were as committed politically as we were. And that was a big bond between us.”44

  On the question of whether Peter’s critical judgment may have been clouded by his great enthusiasm for knowing artists personally, Ashton is both firm and indulgent, seemingly amused by Peter’s weakness for young women but protective of his critical integrity. He would, she recalled, bring artists, often female, to her New York house, and she would say, “Peter . . . that artist is no damn good. But while he was engaged with them, they were the greatest artists in the world.” When she would call him on this triumph of the personal over the objective, he would respond with, “Yeah, you were right.”45 Responding to a question about his infidelity and domestic lapses, she acknowledges that her friend was perhaps lacking in maturity: “I think that Peter could be seen as selfish—or as an impulsive adolescent. But . . . [that] doesn’t seem important to me and never did.”46

  In summing up her relationship with Peter, Dore Ashton gave an eloquent tribute to their long friendship. With respect to hi
s professional accomplishments, she said she respects him as an art historian and critic, especially for his major works, such as German Expressionist Painting and his “excellent” 1975 monograph on Sam Francis. But her regard extends strongly onto moral ground as well: “He never . . . shirked his moral obligation as . . . a proper thinking intellectual with values that I respect. . . . That’s the most important thing I could say about Peter. . . . [And that’s why we] remain friends, even when it was sometimes awkward to defend him. . . . Underneath he was brave and had principles [which] he acted upon—unlike almost everybody else in what they like to call the art world. . . . So he was the only one I had . . . other than one or two artists, that I could depend on in terms of anything I was doing. And I’ll say, in very leftish kinds of causes.”47

  The ties between Dore Ashton and Peter Selz remain strong and speak to their shared values about the essential role of political and ideological belief in serious art. Yet as Dore recalls, “He did only one thing that I thought he shouldn’t do, and I told him not to. And that was to get involved with the Rothko trial.”48 In this, Peter would have done well to listen more closely to his friend. One common and uncharitable view of his participation in the Rothko estate trial was that he went mainly for the $20,000 expert witness fee from Marlborough Gallery. Whatever the truth is in this regard, Selz’s involvement in the infamous Rothko trial remains, fairly or not, the single largest blemish on his reputation.

  In broad outline, the complex trial went as follows: While still a struggling artist with a young family, Rothko set aside a few of his best canvases as an endowment for his wife and children—an indication of his intentions.49 His 1968 will clarified his plans for the family as well as set up the Mark Rothko Foundation. It also named three trusted friends— Theodoros Stamos, Bernard Reis, and Morton Levine—as executors. In May 1970, less than three months after he committed suicide, these men secretly turned over control of 798 paintings to Rothko’s sometime dealer, Marlborough Gallery. Director Frank Lloyd notified the widow, Mary Alice Beistle Rothko (“Mell”)—the Rothkos were estranged and living apart when he died—that under the terms of agreement, Marlborough owned all of the paintings. Three months later she, too, died. In July 1971, at artist Herbert Ferber’s urging, the guardians of the Rothko children and heirs, Kate (age twenty) and Christopher (almost eight), sued the executors and Marlborough on behalf of the estate. The trial was, according to Lee Seldes, author of a 1974 book on the subject and the only journalist to cover every day of the proceedings, “the longest [the court’s decision did not come until December 1975], most complicated, and costliest in the history of art.” The Marlborough’s directors and the estate executors were convicted on several counts of defrauding the Rothko estate and ordered to pay $9.2 million, including fines. The executors were removed for “negligence and conflict of interest,” and Marlborough was ordered to return the 658 unsold paintings.50

  In discussing the trial and its ramifications, attorney Henry Lydiate points out some of the hyperbole typical of the expert opinions rendered: “In order to assess the ‘true value’ of the paintings in question (the restitutional value of the works sold by Marlborough under the terms of the unfairly generous contracts), the court called upon a series of experts to give testimony to the past and future standing of Mark Rothko. There followed the most farcical interlude. The dealers, critics, historians, who had so carefully nurtured and fattened the baby of Abstract Expressionism to create the single most important movement in the history of American painting, were required to justify themselves.”51 Selz’s assignment as expert witness was to back up evaluations he had provided for Marlborough. These conservative estimates of Rothko paintings’ worth and projection of future value, which were then presented by the Marlborough and the estate executors, favored the defendants’ interests. At the trial, however, Selz spoke glowingly of Rothko’s stature. In his decision, Judge Millard L. Midonick cited these high claims: “Both Professor Selz and Robert Goldwater . . . compared Rothko to Michelangelo, and the professor stated that the artist’s paintings can be likened to Annunciations”52—in which case the works could reasonably be expected to be priced accordingly.

  The broader impact of the case, according to Lydiate, was to expose the “sophisticated machinations of the art market, underlining the need for all artists to seek and take independent professional legal advice when entering into any contractual arrangements.”53 Suspicion of the art market and recognition of the potential for corruption as greater sums of money land on the table were something Peter Selz noted with concern while still at MoMA. He came to deplore the influence of galleries on contemporary art.

  In some corners of the art world, and in Seldes’s book, Peter was all but vilified for his involvement as an expert witness for Marlborough. There are of course other perspectives from informed observers, and Peter naturally denies any wrongdoing.54 In his own account, he is aligned with the forces of good. Selz’s main defense is that he was a close friend of the artist, and so he would of course do nothing against Rothko’s interests. But Dore Ashton’s account brings a different and frankly less ingenuous perspective to the situation: “Well, I’ll give you my point of view. I wrote a book about Rothko and knew him very well. I refused to get involved on either side in that messy, horrible lawsuit. And I told Peter, ‘Don’t get involved. I don’t care which side you’re on, because it certainly will be bad for you.’ I think I understand why he did it; other people didn’t. . . . Anyway, I think that in the Rothko case his judgment was poor—he should have listened to me.”55

  But even having said this, Ashton still attempted to shield her friend. She went on to elaborate the details of the “messy” Rothko matter, and in doing so she appears to close ranks with Peter on the side of the defendants:

  [Peter] and I saw it, I believe, in the same terms. If I had been involved, I would have been on the side of the people who were being sued— all of whom . . . died soon thereafter. . . . It destroyed a lot of people’s lives. Stamos, for instance, went to Greece because they were going to seize his house in New York. And Stamos, I can tell you, was a very close friend. I never was in Mark’s studio when the phone wouldn’t ring and it was Stammy. So, I’m a good witness in that respect. I know who his friends were . . . the ones who were attacked—which is really paradoxical. And those children were, in my opinion, in the hands of a very manipulative former friend [Herbert Ferber] of Mark Rothko, who Rothko in my living room called a traitor. . . . He got the kids to sue. Ferber was very angry at Mark. . . . So, there are lots of things about the Rothko case that all the accounts leave out.56

  When pressed on the subject recently, Selz finally explained why he testified. Yet despite his apparently good-faith account, which focuses entirely on his appraisals, his personal motivation remains less than clear:

  Mark had told me more than once that he wanted to leave enough assets in his will so that his two children would be taken care of. When this provision was taken out of the trust, I hoped that it could be reinstated during the court hearings. Unfortunately, this did not happen. The people who were against the executors claimed that Bernard Reis had a conflict of interest, as he was both an executor of the estate and the accountant for Marlborough, Rothko’s dealer. This Mark knew and must have felt comfortable with it. Reis was a very close friend of Mark’s and very much in the center of the art world. Stamos, who was vilified in Seldes’s book, was Mark’s closest friend and not a self-serving man. As, at the time, I was probably the person most knowledgeable about the value of Rothko’s pictures, it made sense for Marlborough to ask me to do the appraisals. They were not the kind a certified appraiser would do, but figures that were as close as I could come, with the sale and auction records that I consulted. Although the court eventually decided against the executors, it accepted my estimates.57

  Peter later clarified several important details. He believed that Rothko never intended his children to be so financially independent that they would not hav
e to work, and the Rothko Foundation was established for the support of older artists. What Selz hoped would be reinstated during the court hearings was the provision for funds to go to the foundation for that purpose. That, in effect, seems to be Selz’s main argument with the suit by the plaintiff children. But his main justification for his role in the trial is that he possessed the insurance evaluations for the works in the MoMA Rothko exhibition.58

  Wayne Andersen agrees with Dore Ashton that their friend should not have become involved in the Rothko trial, suggesting also that the fee clouded his judgment.59 Wayne, however, is disturbed that Dore took the side of Frank Lloyd and Bernard Reis for the sake of Stamos, rather than the side of Rothko’s wife and the children. Lloyd was a superb player in the international art business, in which, as Wayne puts it, “crookedness is the name of the game.” With that judgment Peter concurred: “Frank Lloyd was a crook—there’s no doubt about that.”60

  Wayne, who knew Rothko well enough to “have an occasional beer with him,” had his own reasons for distrusting Lloyd. In 1963 Wayne was recommended by artist Robert Motherwell and renowned art historian Rudolf Wittkower to direct Lloyd’s new gallery on 57th Street. Lloyd tested Andersen’s knowledge of artists by holding up photographs of artworks and asking who painted them. Then, again displaying a photograph, he asked, “Now, how would you sell this Rembrandt?” Wayne, after studying the image for a moment, testing Lloyd’s patience, responded, “I don’t think it’s by Rembrandt.”

  “Then who is it by?” Lloyd asked.

  Gambling, Wayne said, “I think it is by Jan Lievens.”

  For a moment Lloyd seemed trapped. Then he continued brusquely, “All right. Now tell me how you sell it as a Rembrandt?” That ended the interview and any possibility of Andersen’s association with Marlborough Gallery. David McKee, whom Andersen describes as “impeccably honest,” took the job four years later. In 1972 he left to establish his own gallery, eventually signing on two of Marlborough’s most important artists, Franz Kline and Philip Guston—the latter, according to McKee, after a contractual disagreement with Lloyd.61