Nathan Oliveira has not sought dramatic change in his art. Instead, his passion is for continuing an inner-directed artistic tradition attached to the human subject. His art represents a response [italics added] to artists, both past and present, an ongoing dialogue with artists from Rembrandt and Goya to Munch, Beckmann, Giacometti, and de Kooning—whom he recognizes for their insights into the human condition using the visual means at the painter’s disposal. The evocation of mystery that the viewer experiences . . . derives from a depth of feeling refracted through artistic tradition and transmitted to the spectator by the artist’s hand.50
This apparent resistance to change (at least for its own sake) and actively looking to the past for inspiration and expressive forms would seem, to some, to run counter to the modernist credo that we must break with the past. However, Oliveira’s original interpretation of his influences and sources seems to have freed him to create his own “modernist” figuration, in practice giving form and tangible substance to Selz’s ideas. No wonder the two appreciated and admired each other.
Oliveira, in an early interview that Selz quotes in his monograph, acknowledges his artistic debts while endeavoring to explain his objectives. Listing the artists above along with other important influences, Oliveira proceeds to describe his tradition-derived modernist position:
Goya, Beckmann . . . all these artists, really make up part of me . . . I’m not interested in altering the course of the art world, to be so current, so immediately at the leading edge. . . . I readily admit my influences and those people who are important to me, and in some sense, I’m a composite, as are all artists who are really good. . . . I happen to choose those artists who deal with mystery and if you want to call it that, the supernatural . . . those elements of great mysterious forces—not that I actuate them—but I think of painting as a vehicle. Visual art is a vehicle for creating worlds that are non-existent.51
Finally, Oliveira explains the course of Peter’s life journey in terms of creative life force. According to Nathan, people—women especially— provide the energy that fuels this force and the artistic productivity that results, a phenomenon with which he personally identifies.52 Despite the “handmaiden” connotations, the notion that the woman’s role is to enable greatness in men—the idea of the muse—dies hard.
• • •
Peter Selz’s unflagging loyalty to the art and artists and the ideas in which he believes remains consistent. Oliveira pinpointed it: “He maintains that loyalty. It’s something that is unshakable with him. He’s like a bulldog. That’s one of the great, endearing qualities with Peter.”53 The same can be said of his loyalty to his earlier writing and exhibition subjects, especially their historical, national, and political components. And as with Sam Francis and Nathan Oliveira, Peter’s enthusiasms are often enabled and supported by enlightened art dealers. Among the most important in that respect is Paula Kirkeby, director of Smith-Andersen Gallery with its associated graphics shop. Kirkeby also played a key role in the career of Sam Francis, whom she represented for twenty-five years. Paula thinks of these three closely interconnected friends—Selz, Francis, and Oliveira—in the fondest personal terms. As she recalls in a 2010 e-mail: “In 1969 I opened my first exhibit of Oliveira’s monotypes. Peter Selz was right there to see them, as always very enthusiastic. I knew Peter through Adja Yunkers [Dore Ashton’s first husband], so there was a small relationship between us prior to the Oliveira show.”54
She goes on to tell of an early interaction between Peter and Nathan: “I remember a party at our house, lots of Stanford people, Nate included as well as Peter. One of them was wearing a red shirt, I think it was Nate. Peter said he liked the shirt and the next thing I knew they disappeared and returned to the party with Peter wearing the red shirt and Nate Peter’s shirt! They were reliably playful guests.”
Paula also remembers the more unlikely connection between Sam Francis and Peter: “Sam Francis and Peter were very close. Whenever Sam and family were around, Peter was always there. I always felt it was more about family than anything else.”
She concludes by saying: “On different occasions, either here [Bay Area] or in Los Angeles, when I would go to museums or galleries with Peter, people would recognize him and come and say hello. Some were young unknown artists or students, and Peter was unbelievable with them. . . . He had the time and interest. Wonderful quality in someone who had tremendous power in the art world.”
Another important ongoing gallery connection is Jack Rutberg Fine Arts on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Selz and Rutberg have a rapport that embraces not only their interest in individual artists, but also, and perhaps even more so, the political and social passions that these artists manifest. In that respect, there could hardly be a more powerful example than the Swiss American artist Hans Burkhardt (see Fig. 22). When Rutberg first met Peter in the early 1980s, he had already been representing Burkhardt for about a decade, convinced that Hans was “among the most extraordinary painters of our time.”55 Peter had a limited awareness of Burkhardt, but no real exposure to his work. Hans Burkhardt was not just a Los Angeles–based artist; he had New York credentials also as a studio mate of Arshile Gorky from 1928 to 1937. Willem de Kooning visited frequently. Burkhardt, however, seems to have been the cannier of the two, being careful as he swept the studio floor at the end of the day to save the rejected drawings that had been tossed aside. Burkhardt arrived in Los Angeles in 1937 with the largest collection of early Gorky works outside the artist’s own holdings.
Carole long before had tried to interest Peter in Burkhardt; she had some of his political posters, and her mother was a neighbor of his in the Hollywood Hills. But finally it was Rutberg who brought Peter to Hans’s Jewett Drive studio to see the sixty paintings composing the Desert Storm series, his response to the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91. Peter was astounded by his first meeting with the artist. It seemed almost unfathomable that Hans, at age eighty-six, could have created the works in the span of a few months. But Peter understood such passion and immediately set about making it known. The first step was to read a paper at the International Congress of Art Critics titled “The Stars and Stripes: Johns to Burkhardt.” Anthologized in Beyond the Mainstream, the essay served as the text for Hans Burkhardt: Desert Storms, the 1991 exhibition at Rutberg’s gallery. Peter, with his friend and, in this case, accomplice, Jack Rutberg, set out to retrieve an accomplished artist and powerful political voice from relative obscurity. Included in that effort was another Desert Storms exhibition at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
Rutberg recalls attending the exhibition of treasures from the Hermitage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with Peter: “The excitement of discovery was animated and contagious as we moved through the exhibition discussing and critiquing works. We turned a corner and came upon a small Van Gogh painting of prisoners in a courtyard. It was a magical moment for Peter. This painting . . . was the very image in a postcard that Peter, as a young boy in Munich, so loved and had pinned to his bedroom wall some eight decades earlier.” In 2000, Peter and Jack attended the LACMA opening of Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000. According to the official statement of purpose for this ambitious exhibition, it “would not be a traditional art historical survey, nor would it attempt to establish a new canon or identify certain types of artistic production as distinctively ‘Californian.’ Rather, it would investigate the relationship of art to the image of California and to the region’s social and political history.”56 This thematic promise raised high expectations, and the history of the show’s reception was largely one of disappointment, despite the enormous staff effort and a degree of democratic process involved in early conceptualization. In a way, the show was bound to come up short. According to Rutberg, Peter Selz judged it harshly: “It’s a terrible show.” In response to which Jack said, “It’s time for you to write your book. After all, you’ve been writing it all your life.”57 Both Peter and Susan Landauer have different versions
of how the book came about, Susan citing an exhibition that they intended to co-curate at the San Jose Museum of Art. When the exhibition was canceled, the museum withdrew as co-publisher. But all three agree that Peter’s essay in Reading California, a companion to Made in California, the catalogue for the LACMA exhibition, did indeed provide the impetus for his award-winning study of political art in California.58
Whether or not a museum conversation was the literal beginning of Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, the story underlines the importance to both men of the social and political dimension of art. Another artist they have discussed in these terms is the painter Jerome Witkin (brother of photographer Joel Peter Witkin). Whereas Hans Burkhardt is the observer of human inhumanity, of holocaust in general, Jerome Witkin focuses on the Nazi Holocaust specifically, in paintings of such brutality that they are almost unbearable to examine. A March 2007 article by Selz in Art in America introduces Witkin as one of the greatest examples of figuration in the service of social conscience in recent art. This is exactly the territory where Peter Selz thrives.
Examining the range of Selz’s “retirement” projects, we are reminded that his interests and loyalties remain attached to his own roots—in Germany but, more important, with German Expressionism as well as Neue Sachlichkeit painting. Over the years, Peter has returned periodically to his old interests, many of them attached to his early work on German art. In 1969 at Berkeley he presented a Richard Lindner retrospective, the first in the United States, which traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Peter’s 1973 Ferdinand Hodler exhibition at Berkeley was the first in this country, and it traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard. Peter loves to draw the connections he sees between artists like Hodler and German American Lyonel Feininger. And then in 1978 he presented German and Austrian Expressionism: Art in a Turbulent Era, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and then shown in Minneapolis.
Peter’s 2002 appointment to the board of Neue Galerie in New York is one reminder of the pioneering role he has played in connection with German and Austrian art. He is one of the few American scholars whose name almost automatically appears on such a list. Yet the memory of his contributions seems to be dimming as younger curators wrestle to establish primary positions in the highly competitive art history and museum fields. In that competition, the key contributions of their predecessors occasionally—and perhaps inadvertently—go unacknowledged.
Such a problem arose with the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2006–7 show Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s.59 The exhibition was an eye opener and a public success for the museum, the relatively esoteric subject matter notwithstanding. However—and here is the problem—in 1980 a thematically quite similar exhibition, German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic, opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and then traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Peter was chairman of the exhibition committee of four.60 For both catalogues, the cover illustration is the same Christian Schad painting, Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), though the Met’s catalogue uses a detail of the transvestite standing to the right in the full composition. Nowhere in the grander 2006 publication is mention made of the 1980 show or catalogue, or of its curators. Peter, who in the first publication wrote a chapter titled “Artist as Social Critic,” was unhappy that the Metropolitan Museum of Art failed to acknowledge such an important predecessor and encouraged an investigation of the oversight. My polite inquiry initiated a civil, even pleasant, phone and e-mail exchange with the curator and editor of the book, with assurances that in the next printing Selz would be acknowledged.61 He looks forward to the fourth printing, should it ever occur. For now, it is unfortunate that the art historian who introduced the subject to America—as Selz would like to be seen— has no presence in this recent venture.
Here is how critic Robert Hughes opened his review of the exhibition that Peter and his colleagues put together in 1980: “The show . . . deals with an aspect of modernism that 15 years ago was thought hardly worth discussing. What could be further from the concerns of Matisse and Braque than the images to which German intellectuals gave the name Neue Sachlichkeit—‘new objectivity’? There, in contrast to the French tradition of measure, delectation and ordered feeling—of art ‘above’ politics—was a cold, laconic, even squalid-looking art that wanted to contribute its voice to the tormented political theater of the Weimar Republic.”62
Peter Selz really is returning full circle to his German roots and the art and artists with whom he began his long journey. Scholarship does indeed move forward, providing more information along with new insights and understandings based on serious research. The reward, even the inherent pleasure, in scholarly writing and other means of communicating new ideas turns out to be providing this foundation on which others may incrementally build. Selz is understandably disappointed by the lapse associated with Glitter and Doom. But what we really learn from Peter’s momentary annoyance is that for him, his publications and exhibitions are his identity. Like most of us, he wants to be liked, but he also wants to be admired.
So, for Peter, Glitter and Doom represents a small rip in the fabric of an unusually independent and largely successful career—the same career that was honored just a few years ago by Selz’s College Art Association colleagues on that February day in New York. One would hope that Art of Engagement (winner of CAA’s award for best art book of 2006)—along with German Expressionist Painting, New Images of Man, Art in Our Times, Art in a Turbulent Era, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Max Beckmann (also Beckmann: The Self-Portraits), Sam Francis, Chillida, Nathan Oliveira, and Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (with a major nod to collaborator Kristine Stiles)—would compensate for this single slight. Peter proudly points out that his writing has been translated into fourteen languages, including Basque and, most recently, Finnish.
• • •
This study of a life has relied heavily on the subject’s own oral history accounts—his memories—filled in and elaborated, and sometimes contradicted, by the observations of over forty individuals whose lives intersected Peter’s in meaningful and revealing ways over nine decades. Although this is a limited sample, most of the important events, accomplishments, and people in Peter’s life do appear. It is not the case that in this series of “sketches” no stone was left unturned, but that is probably just as well. We have been guided in this biographical quest by important constants that go back to Munich: Peter’s love of art; his problematic relationships, especially with women; and the political life that must grow out of his early involvement in the Werkleute. These themes do not entirely explain his life, but they do carry heavy importance and provide useful touchstones.
Peter’s reputation lies in the early prominence he achieved as a voice for and about modernist art in Europe and America. In that respect, his assimilation into life in the United States was thorough and complete. His innovative publications and provocative exhibitions have secured his position as an important presence and voice in his chosen field. This achievement is in part the result, as he is the first to point out, of being in the right place at the right time. In the 1960s, first in New York and then at Berkeley, he became as close to a celebrity as ordinary (which Peter is not) art historians could be. Peter certainly relished the attention and took full advantage of the benefits, social and professional, that that status conferred. In 2008, Peter was honored by a mayoral proclamation from Berkeley’s mayor Tom Bates declaring March 25 Peter Selz Day. He was surrounded by his family and friends as he accepted the recognition for his contributions to his adopted city. And it seemed entirely appropriate that, there in city council chamber, he stood facing the 1973 Romare Bearden mural whose commission he had advocated as a civic arts commissioner more than thirty years earlier. Peter cannot complain about being a prophet without honor i
n his hometown. Nor was this the first such honor he received. Perhaps the most meaningful was the Order of Merit, First Class, awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany on 18 September 1963 for his “interest in twentieth-century German art.” The award document was signed in Bonn by Dr. Heinrich Lübke, president of the Federal Republic, and presented at a ceremony in New York.
Ariel Parkinson was among the close friends and family who attended the ceremony at Berkeley’s city hall. Ariel lives in the Berkeley hills a few blocks from Peter and Carole.63 She is almost Peter’s age, and the two of them have made a practice of walking through their residential neighborhood several times a week. They are obviously very fond of each other. Ariel is an artist with an interest in scenic design and theater, and as such her art would not seem to appeal to Peter’s tastes. Nonetheless, because he likes her, he came to like her art. In 2009–10, in a show he co-curated in a commercial gallery on Bancroft Avenue, directly across from the UC Berkeley campus, he featured, among other works, several of Ariel’s life-size stuffed-cloth nude male figures. The exhibition as a whole revisited his 1959 New Images of Man show at MoMA. Bearing the same title but with the addition of “and Woman,” it aspired to update that controversial and influential exhibition.64 Among the women included in the exhibition, Ariel stands out for her independent and eccentric vision—definitely producing new images of man—by a woman.
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