Both Andersen and McKee consider Peter’s role in the trial as minimal and having little effect. McKee, who says he admires Peter for his observations on modern art, views the whole business as relatively unimportant in the Selz story. At the same time, Andersen and McKee agree that Rothko’s intentions may have been ignored by the executors and Marlborough. Andersen describes Peter as being “like a media-trapped celebrity caught in a sex scandal,” providing testimony that “reverberates and constantly comes up, even though by now no one seems to remember what testimony he gave or what side he was on, if any.”62 Still, he managed to insert himself recklessly into the middle of a scandal and apparently did not acquit himself well on the stand. In her book on the trial, journalist Lee Seldes goes out of her way to disparage Peter’s performance at the trial. She compares his testimony most unfavorably to that of Meyer Schapiro, incidentally one of Peter’s heroes: “Professor Schapiro, whose authority in his field was unquestioned, exuded a dignity and honesty that were refreshing after Professor Selz’s mocking tones.” Virtually every reference to Selz put him in a bad light as an inconsistent and, overall, ineffective witness.63 Ashton and Andersen attribute these “lapses” to a degree of naïveté. But they can also be interpreted as examples of Peter’s innate inability to assess a situation realistically in terms of his own participation and the possible consequences. He is, in Wayne Andersen’s assessment, unfamiliar with the idea of delayed gratification.
Probably the most enigmatic of Peter’s close colleagues, Andersen has had an unconventional, but brilliantly so, academic career, in addition to pursuing a nonconformist series of explorations in several unrelated fields, including maintaining Arabian horses in Arizona. According to Andersen, the two met in 1962 in Paris, where Peter introduced him to Leon Golub. Peter was there on MoMA business in connection with the planned Rodin exhibition, and Wayne was able to play an intermediary role in the difficult negotiations with the Rodin Museum for securing loans and overseeing shipment to New York. This encounter launched a friendship that has lasted to this day.
Two fascinating yet somewhat eccentric studies by Andersen, Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and German Artists and Hitler’s Mind: Avantgarde Art in a Turbulent Era (Editions Fabriart, 2007), acknowledge Selz specifically and suggest the basis for their close collegial friendship. Enclosed in Peter’s copy of the first book was a brief letter that begins, “Dear Peter, I assume by now your book [Art of Engagement] is rolling through the press. [As for Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine] I think of it as your kind of book. My book on German art is moving right along.”64 The book is inscribed, “For Peter Selz, for forty years of supportive friendship.” In the prologue to the 2007 book, Andersen acknowledges his debt to Selz in a way that emphatically declares their close personal relationship: “It pleases me to speak of Peter Selz as a supporting friend over the near whole of my professional life. His path-breaking book, German Expressionist Painting, was on my study table when I was an undergraduate at the University of California in Berkeley and has been on my desk and frequently opened throughout the period of writing this book.”65 Although Peter displays a very personal approach to modernism in his writings and exhibitions, he still seeks collegial approval. Andersen, in contrast, seems to disregard potential negative criticism. Still, Wayne admires the risks Peter took with many of his exhibitions, singling out 1959’s New Images of Man: “He alters, you know, pushes. It isn’t so much expanding the envelope as it is ripping it up.”66
Andersen’s personalism, in which the heterosexual male gaze is brought to bear on a variety of subjects that capture his attention, is echoed in Peter’s writing but in a more subdued way. Wayne, differentiating how he and his friend write about artists, points out that Peter “is interested in artists more than in art.”67 He goes so far as to characterize Peter’s writing as “art appreciation” but, intending it as a compliment, adds that it is “the best kind of art appreciation.” Presumably by that he means that it is accessible and entertaining in its anecdotal quality; he appreciates Peter as an effective teacher and storyteller, the kind who can excite students by his passion for art. Like Selz’s friend Gary Carson, Andersen also sees in him the ability to discern and exploit patterns, moving in the direction of the startling connections of scholars such as Robert Rosenblum.
Despite his reservations about Selz as a traditional scholar, Andersen wrote a long and appreciative review of Art of Engagement for the journal The European Legacy. In effect providing a sophisticated independent essay on the subject of art and politics, Wayne makes the valid observation that “Selz’s excellent and insightful book [provides] some background history that comes forward into the California context of the 1960s. I am referring to the post–World War I span of years during which Stalin’s communism emerged on one side of a common border and Hitler’s fascism on the other and when political dissidence altered the flow of modern art. . . . The situation for artists in the German and Russian 1920s helps to clarify the nature of the Californian sociopolitical art while also positioning Selz as a vital presence and participating force in the topic of his book.”68
Wayne’s admiration for Selz is based partly on the way Peter sets himself apart, whether unconsciously or strategically, from most art historians. There is something akin to a sliver of envy when he describes Selz as a “barbarian” and an authentic outsider: “I mean barbarian in the ancient Roman sense—an outsider who doesn’t speak the same language, dress the same, share the same values [as his colleagues]. A kind of savage—he is prone to outbursts and quick to laugh.” Andersen applies an amusing metaphor to Peter’s personal level of control: “His control cutoff point is below that of most others—a thermostat that shuts off at a lower temperature.”69
It is almost as if part of Andersen would like to be Peter Selz. According to Andersen, “Peter and I had the potential of bohemianism and a few decades earlier would have been hippies. The strings that eventually joined us were gnarled and knotty, pulled by associations with the same creative people. One of the most important was Leon Golub.” In typical fashion, Andersen is ready with a colorful anecdote:
Leon was featured in critical minds in Selz’s New Images of Man. His abrasive canvases drew the wrath of the most vocal critic, William Rubin, an ardent supporter of the New York School of Painting. Rubin, whose verbosity matched his pompous outbursts, wrote a scathing review of the entire show that, apart from Golub’s canvases, included a selection of sculptures by Cosmo Campoli, also a Chicagoan. Neither was devastated by Rubin’s assault. Leon returned the assault as a drawing on plain paper, mailed to Rubin. The drawing depicts Rubin on his knees before a toilet bowl, slurping. Rubin is saying between gulps: “Oh, I love writing art criticism—slurp! Slurp!”70
Perhaps one of the greatest attractions of bohemia, for both Wayne and Peter, is the opportunity to conduct one’s life largely outside the restrictive domain of conventional rules, the imagination thereby freed to explore and conjure at will, taking in life as one grand fiction. And the idea of writing one’s own life story goes quite far in explaining these two close friends and the adhesive that joins them.
Like Peter, Wayne proudly sees himself as operating outside the mainstream. In his latest book, for example, he questions not only the artistic primacy that scholars and critics have accorded Marcel Duchamp, but indeed his claim of being a “genuine” artist at all. The front-jacket-flap text, which introduces Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah (2010) with a warning about what the reader should expect, also encapsulates a liberated bohemian-life “ideal” shared by the author and his friend Peter Selz: “Marcel Duchamp’s gift to artists was similar to the Marquis de Sade’s gift to sadists—relief from moral restraints, accountability, guilt, and shame.”71 The final chapter, “Guilty Passage,” is devoted to a comparison of Duchamp’s Étant donnés and Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), still generally regarded as the supreme masterpiece of erotic art. Ande
rsen’s language is, as required by the subject, frankly and boldly sexual. But there is a kind of detachment from the graphic and crude sexuality that displays a coolly focused analytical mind at work. One might say that, in the relationship between these mutually admiring friends, Andersen operates more comfortably in the realm of intellectual than emotional response to art. And I think in a way he may envy Peter’s fundamentally more direct and unselfconscious joy in looking.
In contrast, there is darkness in Andersen’s vision that brings to mind the moral fervor of an Old Testament prophet. A brooding quality—a sense of crisis and impending tragedy—informs his harsh scrutiny of Duchamp and, finally, the art world itself. For all his anti-mainstream views, Selz would never go this far. So, despite their collegial sympathy, this is where the two part company. Andersen may be the deeper thinker, but in the end Selz is the life-affirming optimist.
• • •
There is an opposing side to what we might call the Selz duality, and it is embodied by his association with an entirely different set of colleagues. Two of them, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and Fr. Terrence Dempsey, who was also a student of Peter’s, bring another perspective to Selz the “barbarian” in terms of his collaborative generosity and his loftier interests, redirected from the flesh to the spirit. Jane and Peter traveled paths that could have merged much earlier than actually happened. Jane had switched from studio art to art history at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate shortly before Selz appeared on campus. And, like Peter, she had department chairman Ulrich Middeldorf as her advisor, whose decisive influence she acknowledges: “For both of us [meaning Peter], he was absolutely critical to our careers.” She remembers Chicago, along with the Art Institute, as a place that “redirected our lives.”72 But the two never met there. Nor did their paths cross at MoMA in 1959 and the early 1960s, when, as an art history professor (for twelve years) at Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey, she had occasion to borrow works from MoMA for various exhibitions.73
Jane was a member of the Society for Art, Religion, and Culture (ARC) in New York; Alfred Barr also belonged to ARC and had a lot to do with arranging loans from MoMA, including the Matisse chasuble, secured by Jane for an exhibition she curated at the Newark Museum. Both Barr and his curator Dorothy Miller were interested in spirituality in art, and this provided a MoMA connection for Jane. Interviewing Barr some years later for ARC, she learned that his father had been a professor at the Presbyterian Seminary in Chicago and that as a young man Alfred had collaborated with his father on a course in church history in which he presented a slide lecture on the history of religious art. But despite this fortuitous access to MoMA, Jane does not remember “being with Peter in the period that I was in New York, though I was in the Museum of Modern Art a lot.”74
The two had to relocate to California to discover one another and their similar experiences studying art history at the University of Chicago. They establish what turned out to be a lasting friendship in which spirituality had an important, possibly central, role. It was in Berkeley that Jane and her then husband, John Dillenberger, met Peter and found a somewhat strange area of mutual interest, or rather an unexpected basis for it. John and Jane were mainstays of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a West Coast counterpart to the New York institution where Paul Tillich, who wrote the prefatory note for Peter’s New Images of Man catalogue, taught for over twenty years.75 What is so fascinating about this connection, which illustrates the complex nature of Selz’s alliances, is the bond that developed between the self-described atheist and a couple dedicated to their Christian faith and its highest humanitarian and spiritual goals.
It was natural for Jane Dillenberger, given her friendship with Selz, to go to him with her proposal for an exhibition at UAM on American religious art. She had already secured the participation of Joshua Taylor at the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Art (now Smithsonian American Art Museum). As Jane recalls, “Peter knew Josh Taylor from Chicago [he had been Peter’s dissertation advisor] . . . so he signed on to have the exhibition here [Berkeley], and it was Joshua Taylor who named it The Hand and the Spirit: Religious Art in America. . . . I was curator of that show . . . [Taylor] contributed to the catalog and we made the choices together, but I was the person who located everything. And in those adventures I again had contact with Peter.” The exhibition opened in 1972 and “I remember strolling through with Peter . . . I had included a George Inness painting, which was called September Afternoon. [All the other artworks had religious imagery or titles.] Peter came to that and he said, ‘My God, Jane, can’t we at least call it God’s September Afternoon?’ He thought it would be just bewildering . . . why it was in the exhibition. Can’t you just hear him saying that?”76
Jane now describes Peter as her friend and frequent collaborator (in 2008 they co-taught a course titled “The Spiritual Dimensions in Modern Art and the Collection and Career of Peter Selz” at his home).77 In regard to his deep interest in Goya, Jane mentions that early interpreters of Goya considered the great artist as an “educator,” perhaps thinking that if people looked at the grotesque and cruel things they do, they would be “horrified, and might turn around and . . . reform.” Her friend’s attraction to the demonic notwithstanding, Dillenberger perceived in this an appreciation of ambiguity and complexity, a feature of the modern world that also interested her.
In a later written communication, Dillenberger offers other thoughts on his interest in the demonic: “Peter’s books on the German Expressionist painters are a case in point. The sense of alienation, suffering, and rejection of these artists is expanded and interpreted with sensitivity and his own sense of the demonic. Peter believes that his long interest in Goya deeply influenced his sensibilities. Surely Goya’s Disasters of War must have resonated with his own existence in war-torn Germany. Peter’s interest in German Expressionism must be related also to this.”78
Jane goes on to define what she sees as Selz’s personal strengths: “I know of no one in the art world with a more passionate and persistent love of art. In his nineties he still attends all the gallery and exhibition openings. He knows and is known to artists, art dealers, museums’ staffs, and art historians countrywide. For me professionally and personally he has been a precious friend and colleague.”79 And she sees that his broader social conscience parallels liberal religious thought. What she can say about Peter in terms of a relationship to “faith,” again in the broader sense, is derived from her observation of his work with GTU graduate students. As to whether Selz’s proclaimed atheism affected their work with their doctoral students, according to Jane, Peter offered advice and direction as if he were “a believer.”80
To this day Selz has a very close relationship to the GTU, where he has continued to organize exhibitions and teach seminars. His attachment to the institution certainly is a testament to his friendship with the Dillenbergers, but it goes beyond that. Although the faith-based belief system associated even with liberal religion is not Peter’s choice, he seems devoted to this ecumenical theological center of learning and inquiry, which is located a few short blocks from the UC campus. When talking with Peter, one gets the impression that the GTU has been a happier association, at least on a personal level, than was the University of California itself.
Jesuit priest Fr. Terrence Dempsey is a close friend of both Jane Dillenberger and Peter Selz. He spent eight years in Berkeley, from 1982 to 1990, working on a Master of Divinity degree and then a Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union, and Selz served on his doctoral committee. Prior to his arrival in Berkeley, Dempsey had read several books and essays by Peter revealing his preference for art that dealt with social justice. Dempsey admired Selz’s humanistic values and vision, finding in them an avenue for dialogue with people who appreciated the religious and spiritual dimensions of contemporary art. Within three months after he landed in Berkeley, Dempsey introduced himself to Peter and signed up for his course on modern art. It was the beginning of a fr
iendship that has lasted to this day. In 1987 Dempsey was named curator of exhibitions at the Graduate Theological Union, where he worked closely with Jane Dillenberger and Selz in choosing artists to exhibit. As a result of these experiences, he was hired by Saint Louis University, where he established the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA), the first interfaith museum of contemporary art in the world. Among the artists featured in MOCRA’s inaugural exhibition in 1992 was Tobi Kahn, a New York painter and sculptor with deep connections to his Jewish heritage. Dempsey saw an interesting and compelling connection between Selz’s humanism and Kahn’s religious identification and introduced them to each other at the opening conference of the museum. Dempsey was right, and Selz has remained a friend and supporter of Kahn and his work.
The attraction of art history for Terrence Dempsey may have come largely from what Selz presented in his work on German Expressionism, always paying attention to its intuitive and emotional sources. For example, Dempsey now describes the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for example, as “generalized spirituality.” At the time of Peter’s retirement in 1988 from the University of California, Dempsey organized a tribute exhibition at the GTU titled Christo and Peter Selz: The Running Fence Revisited. Among the things he mentions about his professor is a “strong ethical component beyond just the presence of the human figure.” Dempsey was attracted as a theologian to the issues that Selz raised in New Images of Man, saying that they made him seem interested in the “rest of the world.” According to Dempsey, Selz was passionate about the social identity and power of art, a quality Dempsey felt few other academics seemed to possess. Indeed, this quality may be what made Peter curious about religion, if not susceptible.
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