Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  Whatever the details of what Dillenberger calls the “appetite for the demonic,” Dempsey sees in Selz a “genuine goodness” and a “love of humanity” that he greatly admires.81 Peter’s longtime, dedicated association with the Graduate Theological Union is a tangible expression of how belief and nonbelief are, for him, reconciled. Nonetheless, his attempt to put that reconciliation into words remains slightly ambiguous, as perhaps it must:

  I like the GTU program, combining art with theology. Though I was and am an atheist, I firmly believe in the spiritual quality of good art, as did artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Rothko. And I do believe that good art is more than its material aspect. That is where I differ with Clement Greenberg, and do not think much of artists like Kenneth Noland. I once described good art as a metaphor for significant human values. This can be thought of as spiritual and would apply to an Impressionist painting as well as to the work of Christo.82

  Still, with these words the door opens wide enough for a rapprochement between disbelief and a spiritual component that, despite his views on religion, is obviously a powerful ingredient in Selz’s core idea of significance in art.

  NINE A Career in Retirement

  RETURNING TO EARLY THEMES AND PASSIONS

  Peter Selz’s personal life took a new turn shortly before his retirement when, on 18 December 1983, he married his fifth wife, Carole Schemmerling.1 Throughout Peter’s long journey, women have played a central role. His interest in women is practically legendary, and over the years he has had many relationships—some supportive, others combative; some brief and forgettable, others enduring and profound. What they have in common is not the nature of the connection—whether personal, professional, or familial—but a pattern of dependency that has in part defined Peter’s life and career. During the retirement years, Carole, more than any other, has knowingly both challenged and enabled him. His prodigious output would have been impossible without her willingness to support and facilitate these last three decades of his remarkably productive career.

  With the marriage and the joining of their two families came a new domestic scene for Peter. Carole brought daughters Mia and Kryssa, ages twenty-three and twenty at the time. In addition, there was Kevin Cox, an African American foster son who had been with Carole’s family for seven years. His mother had died in a fire in 1975 when Kevin was sixteen, and Mia brought home her classmate, asking if he could come live with them. She announced to Carole and her then husband that “Kevin needs a mother. Doesn’t that make your heart cry?”2 Carole said yes, it did, and agreed to take him in. Peter’s daughters, Tanya and Gabrielle, then ages twenty-three and twenty-two, though out of college and living on their own, were still “very dependent upon Peter.”3 Both would continue to spend time in Berkeley with their father and new stepmother. Eventually there were four grandchildren: Mia and Justin Baldwin’s daughters, Kyra and Rian; Kryssa Schemmerling and David Rawson’s son, Wyatt; and Gaby and ex-husband Bogdon Mync’s son, Theo. This is Peter’s present family configuration, which allows him the pleasures of being a grandparent.

  Fifteen years Peter’s junior, Carole is intelligent, politically active, socially committed, and an authentic denizen of the art world, in many respects the ideal marriage partner for Peter (see Figs. 24, 25). With her background in the Los Angeles art world—she was particularly close to several artists of the Ferus Gallery,4 which Peter had found so interesting when at Pomona—and her contact in San Francisco with the Dilexi Gallery circle, she brought to the relationship sophistication and an independent nature. These qualities have served her well in dealing with her husband’s powerful (and controlling) personality. She remains very much her own person.

  Peter and Carole met in November 1979 at a restaurant following a movie that she had attended with architectural critic Alan Temko and his wife, Becky. Alan saw Peter and called him over to their table; after coffee Carole gave him a ride home. What followed was a determined courtship by Peter, but, partly due to their age difference, Carole was “not interested.”5 Furthermore, mutual friends, the artist Hassel Smith and his wife, Donna, warned Carole that Peter was “untrustworthy” when it came to women.6 Peter persisted in his campaign, however (he commenced by sending her a book on American cartoons—an original offering—which he took back a week later, saying it was his last copy). Three years later she capitulated and moved in. Carole was aware of Peter’s reputation regarding women, but something drew her to him. On one level the attraction was what endeared him to many of his students: personal charm, knowledge and love of art, and a fondness for artists, which she shared. And, she confided, she imagined that he was in fact “malleable.”7 She would surely deny that she ever considered him a mentor, but his prominence in the art world promised an interesting life, one that suited her. Furthermore, her children were nervous about her single-woman status.8

  By the time Peter retired in 1988, he and Carole had been living for six years on Regal Road in the high-modernist house designed by Berkeley architect Donald Olsen (who had been a student of Walter Gropius and had worked with Eero Saarinen). The International Style house was commissioned by Peter as the realization of a youthful dream—born of his first experience of modern architecture in Stuttgart in the 1930s.9 Carole had become the facilitator of their very active social life, entertaining in this open and art-filled home. She seems to have understood this to be part of her role, one that she graciously performs to this day. In fact, many friends of the couple credit Carole with a noticeable and positive moderating effect on her husband. Her response by way of explanation is that she is Peter’s firmest critic, calling him, as she puts it, on relationships with other people and even challenging his judgments on art and artists.10 Peter had not experienced this kind of scrutiny and direct critical feedback since Thalia, if then.

  Despite the demands of her own grassroots environmental work— most notably urban creek restoration11—Carole accompanies Peter on their frequent forays into the Berkeley art world and across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. She also manages his busy travel schedule to Los Angeles, New York, and Europe, a pattern that has not slowed. Carole goes along on the more attractive of these excursions, such as the visits to Paris and Giverny in the summer of 2000. The highlight of that adventure included an expensive cab ride to Milly-la-Forêt in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where they hiked to Tinguely’s Cyclops installation.

  • • •

  Peter Selz’s departure from academic life, along with Carole’s one-person spousal support system, has allowed him to become more involved with art galleries, which pleases him and must raise pleasant memories of his first New York years and the 57th Street galleries, not to mention his early art education in his grandfather’s art and antiques emporium. The art journey has thus come full circle. University colleagues may disapprove of this commercial association, but Peter has characteristically found new opportunities to explore and express his fundamental interests. He loves the pursuit, discovery, and introduction of new art and artists, which happens more regularly in galleries than in museums. Selz still thrives on that “rush” of discovery.

  Prominent among the gallery directors with whom he has associated over recent years, putting together shows and writing numerous catalogue essays, are Achim Moeller and Michael Rosenfeld (New York); Paula Kirkeby (Palo Alto, California); Jack Rutberg (Los Angeles); Tracy Freedman, George Krevsky, and Martin Muller (San Francisco); Barry Sakata (Sacramento); and the Alphonse Berber Gallery (Berkeley), which mounted in late 2009 a tribute to Peter titled New Images of Man and Woman. Other gallery associations include ACA and Gallery St. Etienne (New York) and Tasende Gallery (Los Angeles and La Jolla, California). In 1991 Selz put together an exhibition for Larry Gagosian, perhaps the most visible exemplar of the supreme power of the New York art market that Peter so vocally deplored just before he left MoMA for Berkeley. The draw, however, was the opportunity to present work that he believed in by an artist to whom he is devoted. Gagosian Gallery provided a high
-profile venue for Sam Francis, Blue Balls. In 2010, Peter accepted an invitation from Jonathan Clark & Co. to write a short essay for the catalogue of an upcoming Eduardo Paolozzi exhibition in London. In addition, the gallery plans to reproduce Peter’s introduction to New Images of Man, the MoMA exhibition for which he is perhaps best remembered.12

  Alongside these commercial forays, Selz has devoted much time and energy to galleries that are nonprofit institutions, serving on the boards of and organizing exhibitions for Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, Kala Institute in Berkeley, Neue Galerie in New York, and, above all, Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Many of the shows he has undertaken during retirement are done pro bono. Peter finds it difficult to turn down projects that capture his fancy or provide him an opportunity to revisit old enthusiasms—as in recent exhibitions of Stephen De Staebler (Graduate Theological Union, 2007), Richard Lindner (Krevsky Gallery, 2009), and Robert Colescott (Meridian Gallery, 2009). In 1994, Peter was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Study Center to work on the catalogue for the 1996 Richard Lindner retrospective at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. His interest in Lindner goes back well before that exhibition, however. Always adopting a contrary position, Selz rejects the notion of Lindner as a Pop artist, connecting him instead with German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Lindner’s predecessors, in Peter’s view, were Christian Schad and Oskar Schlemmer.13

  The Colescott show, along with a 2010 Morris Graves retrospective, also at Meridian Gallery, celebrates Peter’s unstinting dedication to artists who matter but do not get the attention he feels they deserve. Anne Brodzky, director of Meridian, was determined to present an exhibition of the brilliant African American satirist Robert Colescott. She easily engaged Peter’s participation, who then persuaded Daniell Cornell, at that time the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s contemporary art specialist, to bring it all together. Peter had wanted for years to do a significant Graves exhibition, and Meridian also provided that opportunity.

  Selz was working on the exhibition and catalogue for an Irving Petlin show that was planned for 2009 at the Pennsylvania Academy, but with a change of directorship the project was canceled. Peter was deeply disappointed because, as he said, “I really believe in this work.” Petlin’s work was, however, shown in three simultaneous gallery exhibitions in New York in 2010, and Peter wrote a feature article about him that appeared in the March 2010 issue of Art in America. With his opening lines, Selz encapsulates the main thrust of two careers, the artist’s and his own: “For more than fifty years, Irving Petlin has remained a steadfast proponent of art as both a moral and esthetic enterprise. It is his conviction that the task of the artist is to transmit this sense of commitment to the world.”14

  Perhaps Selz’s greatest accomplishment during his retirement years, certainly from a politically engaged perspective, is the role he played in bringing Fernando Botero’s controversial Abu Ghraib series into the permanent collection of what in 1996 became the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM). According to Peter, he first saw the paintings and drawings in 2006 at Marlborough Gallery in New York: “Like many others, I was impressed by the ‘Guernica of our time.’” When it was initially offered to Berkeley for exhibition the following year, BAM director Kevin Consey declined because the schedule was full. The Center for Latin American Studies converted a former computer room in the university’s Doe Library and displayed the works from 29 January to 23 March 2007, attracting a large attendance before the series went on to Europe. Not wanting to profit in any way from American torture, Botero offered to give the entire 105 works to Berkeley.15 Consey took the position that they did not “come up to the standards of the Berkeley Art Museum.” Professor Harley Shaiken, head of the Center for Latin American Studies, contacted Peter, who intervened with the chancellor’s office—and the works were accepted. According to Selz, Consey was fired because of his stand on the Botero offer.16 His successor, Lawrence Rinder, installed a temporary exhibition in 2009–10, and the series now stands as a significant gift to BAM. Selz views the Botero works as a bookend to the famous Hans Hofmann collection, and the two as complementary parts of his legacy to the museum, representing two faces of modernist art.

  All these projects have one thing in common: they represent themes, ideas, artists, and directions that have preoccupied Selz from the beginning of his career. For example, in 1989 Peter teamed up with his long-time friend Dore Ashton to co-curate Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic for Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum. The exhibition, introducing work that had been ignored in the West, opened on the very day the Berlin Wall came down.

  These postretirement activities all feed into Selz’s particular modernistart worldview and his construction of a critical and historical edifice for the themes that inspire him. The key building blocks all have to do with the human condition: political engagement, subjectivity and emotion, “peripheral” and unacknowledged artistic vision, and, above all, human presence, whether representational (the human figure) or abstract. These Selz leitmotifs, if we can call them that, are demonstrated in one way or another in the work of all of Peter’s favorite artists.

  The dedication and loyalty Selz bestows upon these chosen artists could be described more accurately as passion than as simple enthusiasm. Such is the case with the Spaniard Eduardo Chillida, whom he ranks as among the leading sculptors of the twentieth century, “as important as David Smith.”17 Thanks in part to Agnes Denes, who encouraged Peter to explore more thoroughly the conceptual foundations of art, he was able to develop a deep appreciation of Chillida’s great public site-specific creations. Selz recalls attending a talk Chillida gave at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in the late 1990s. The artist was being considered for a major commission, a sculpture to be placed opposite the museum entrance on a site with a sweeping view of the Golden Gate and its vermilion bridge, and beyond to the Marin Headlands. If Chillida had been selected, his piece would no doubt have created a powerful physical and visual connection between people and their environment, built and natural.

  In his book Beyond the Mainstream—of which, among his many publications, he seems to be especially proud—Selz makes a distinction between modernist sculpture that is self-referential and that which, like Chillida’s, performs a meaningful social function, being at once site-specific and universal: “Public sculpture has become an increasingly important aspect of Chillida’s oeuvre. His public works relate to landscape or city and transform their sites into aesthetically valid environments. Although in the tradition of abstract sculpture, they have become meaningful place markers. The master sculptor assumes a social role, giving aesthetic definition to places of human interaction.”18 This, Peter notes, is Chillida’s strength: his work in the public domain “comes to full life only when it enters into a dialogue with the people for whom it was made.”19

  Chillida was in the running for the San Francisco commission after Richard Serra withdrew because the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco could not accept Serra’s condition that the sculpture never be moved (the Museums do not own the land; it belongs to the city). As things turned out, Chillida did not make a proposal, and a work by Mark di Suvero was installed in the choice location. One cannot help but consider this with regret, given the aggressive quality of what now stands in splendid, almost defiant, isolation, calling attention mainly to itself.20

  This is a critique of modernist sculpture that Selz has made consistently. His short list of exceptions includes specific works by Brancusi, Giacometti, Miró, Dubuffet, and Noguchi and a few “memorable” temporary installations, such as David Smith’s Festival of Two Worlds offering at Spoleto, Italy, in 1962 and Christo’s Running Fence in Marin and Sonoma counties. But above all, in terms of an ecological awareness as part of humanist concerns, Chillida’s Wind Combs of 1977 represents for Selz the fully realized ideal of a social, philosophical—and sophisticated—political art. Erected on a formerly inaccessible
piece of rocky Basque coast on the western edge of Chillida’s native San Sebastián, Wind Combs creates in art a perfect union of land, water, and air. A precipitous site overlooking the ocean is transformed into a public plaza where visitors view, experience, and interact with one another and the sculpture. The entire creation speaks eloquently of the profound human relationship to nature and the importance of having places where that relationship is, through art, recognized. Echoing his subject’s stated objectives, Selz described three sited sculptures, each thoughtfully placed as representatives of the three elements, standing at the edge of the city where the Pyrenees meet—literally rise from—the Atlantic Ocean. The trio, Selz wrote in 1986, makes for “one of the most magnificent modern sculptures in the public area.”21 Twenty-three years later in an interview, he reiterated that assessment: “Wind Combs is one of the greatest works of art done out in nature.”22

  To his credit, Selz knew firsthand of what he wrote. On a 1988 trip to Spain, he and Carole met Herschel Chipp in San Sebastián, purposefully to revisit (the Selzes had been twice before) Chillida’s masterpiece. The three Californians and the sculptor were photographed at this great site (see Fig. 21). But there is more to the story. The Selzes and Chipp also convened in Guernica for the dedication of a memorial sculpture by Chillida on 26 April 1988, the fifty-first anniversary of the German Condor Legion’s bombing of the town. That bombing, of course, had led to another masterpiece, Picasso’s Guernica, a key monument in the history of art. Chipp’s exhaustive study of Guernica, based on conversations with Picasso and some of the many women in his life, appeared the same year.23 Professor Chipp, at the invitation of the Basque government (an invitation that Selz says he facilitated), addressed the people of Guernica, saying a few well-chosen and well-received words in Basque to honor the survivors of the bombing and their descendants.24