On their walks, Ariel and Peter forged a friendship with, in her words, “a tonic element of disagreement.” Ariel, who admires Peter, nonetheless does not allow herself to be submerged by his authority:
My friendship with Peter had three levels. As an aspiring painter and designer, I was inevitably impressed by his position and power in the art world. I had used, and continue to use, many of his books and articles as source material. I appreciate his scholarship and command of the field, knowing everybody by name, their life histories, what their work looks like and means. But we find grounds for difference on almost everything. I not only differ—I can be to some extent an untutored beast, [challenging him] on such eminences as Carl André and Christo, de Kooning and Guston, David Smith and Serra—along with Flemish portraits, Renaissance drawings, and equestrian bronzes.
Ariel said she thinks Peter tends to “acknowledge, perhaps too generously, the currents of style,” but that though they find grounds for difference, they “share certain basic aesthetic tastes.” Ariel sticks to her guns, as became evident in our discussion of New Images of Man, the exhibition of Selz’s that she most respects: “He took two very young—they were in school, mind you—artists from this area, Stephen De Staebler and Nathan Oliveira. These two, then totally unknown, are among the few great artists the United States has produced. I would say Leonard Baskin [another Selz favorite] was one, De Staebler was two, and Oliveira was three.” When asked who was number four or five, she paused. I suggested Richard Diebenkorn, whom Selz admires. “No, definitely not Diebenkorn.” She explained: “A group of experts programmed a computer for elements of style to see if they could make a painting by so and so. And the only artist they had any success with was Diebenkorn. He had a formula.”65
But Ariel’s affection for Peter trumps her reservations even about his support for artists she found unworthy. Her description of her friend is a tribute, and a somewhat romantic one at that: “Peter has remained a real human being. He loves and appreciates food and drink. He likes dogs and cows. And . . . it’s very nice to have Peter as a friend, a real friend that you love. But it’s more an affection, for I think of him as a little boy sometimes. I can see a little boy, with bright eyes, very wide apart under dark eyebrows, loving things himself, responding to the old master paintings in his grandfather’s gallery. To the green meadows that they went walking in on Sundays. And girls—endless girls. One girl after another.”66
Peter thrives on attention. And his persistently youthful enthusiasm is what attracts many people, especially students. For many, too, this patented Selz “passion” excuses perceived shortcomings and character flaws. His daughter Gabrielle is only one of many who point to the “creative life force” that has provided the fuel for him to pursue the art life into his early nineties.67 He is widely admired as a phenomenon of durability, and this quality is what artists point to as separating Peter from the pack of other art historians.
Painters Kevan Jenson and Ursula O’Farrell are among the up-and-coming artists of whom Peter is so fond. Jenson recently moved from Los Angeles to Berkeley, partly owing to his contact with Peter, who organized and wrote the catalogue essay for his recent one-man show at San Francisco’s Meridian Gallery. A close personal connection has developed between the two, very much as between Peter and Tobi Kahn in New York. Jenson is effusive in his appreciation of his friend: “Peter Selz has gone out of his way to help me and others with our careers, but his reminder that you, the artist, are connected to the long tradition of art making provides the deepest inspiration. I once overheard him say that ‘painting has been around since Lascaux, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere.’ I knew then I couldn’t stop painting.”68
O’Farrell, whom Peter included in the recent show at the Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley, has this to say: “After graduating from college, I was granted a foreign study scholarship to travel to Germany and Austria to explore my personal fascination with Expressionism. . . . I was quite fortunate to run across several paperback books [in English] in a few German stores—all written by Dr. Peter Selz. His writings guided me and helped me to better appreciate the art I was enthralled with . . . to understand the nature and context of these forceful paintings.”69
Book editor Lorna Price (now Dittmer) came into Peter’s life and career during his time at Pomona College, where as an undergraduate she showed his lecture slides. Then—remarkably, in her view—he hired her to do the preliminary editing of German Expressionist Painting, which was being prepared for the University of California Press. Lorna followed Peter as one of his main editors for years, including several based at UC Press. Along with Kristine Stiles, Lorna may be the most intimately involved with Peter’s publications.
Peter has always been able to invest confidence in the people he’s worked with, whether aspiring young art historians ready to embark on their own careers, or whether someone like me, not an art historian or even an art history major. I’m forever grateful that he placed confidence in the (then rather lightly tried) skills that I could deploy as reader/editor— skills that could serve us both over the years. That confidence did serve to show me the way to a new career track—one which has brought me enormous satisfaction over the course of five decades.70
Late in life, Peter Selz remains surrounded by a veritable congregation of friends, family members, and colorful admirers. There may be fewer such folk among his colleagues, but those who do maintain contact with him tend to be generally indulgent and affectionate. They appreciate his best qualities and are amused—perhaps even charmed—by his foibles. The following words, written by his step-granddaughter, Kyra Baldwin, seventeen years old and preparing to enter university, put it all into satisfactory perspective:
So anyway, I had a great talk with Peter! He asked me why I wanted to go to each school and what I do with my time, and then he just asked me to keep talking. I told him what I had done that day—cut up a Northeastern University sticker and put it back together to spell “another tiny universe” on a windowpane. His eyes lit up. . . . Peter is a supportive, lively grandparent. When we walk into the Berkeley Art Museum or SFMOMA, he knows the people working at the desk. Other museum visitors come up to him and chat. It’s a fun experience, spending time with such a well-known man in his element. Peter insists on taking me to see the SFMOMA permanent collection every couple of years; at this point, it is familiar enough to work as a context for other art I see.71
It turns out that there is a certain sustained—and sustaining—pattern to Peter’s life in art. Despite personal and professional difficulties along the way, he remains committed to an aesthetic and intellectual ideal that has guided him throughout his life. The passion and enthusiasm—it would not be overstating the case to call it wonder—implanted by his grandfather Drey’s expert introduction to the world of great art have only grown over the years. And Kyra’s visits to SFMOMA, like Gabrielle’s regular trips with her father to the Met, bring the art experience full circle. For Peter Selz, those Sunday afternoon visits to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek to study the old masters amounted to a life-defining legacy, the pleasure and inspiration of which he has passed on to subsequent generations.
TEN A Conclusion
LOOKING AT KENTRIDGE AND WARHOL
Throughout his long journey in the subjective, unpredictable, and contradictory world of contemporary art, Peter Selz has steered a focused, if not always steady, course. The study and interpretation of art is almost the opposite of science. Reputations wax and wane—as do the conceptual frameworks employed to identify and measure relative importance. Art is much closer to fashion, especially in a market-driven environment, than most historians or even critics find desirable. Understanding of it is neither absolute nor immutable, and therein may lie part of its attraction. Mystery and enigma are at the heart of the aesthetic experience.
In this fluctuating world, Peter has not feared to adjust his opinions and views when it seemed prudent, most notably with regard to Pop Art. In response to
its eventual critical and art-historical acceptance, he revised his initial dismissal. But that partial acknowledgment of a critical “miscall” does not prevent him from maintaining an unassailable humanist position in his appraisal of two highly significant figures, one the star of the second half of the twentieth century and the other perhaps the most important, in Selz’s view, in recent and current art.
In 2009 Selz had the opportunity to visit two concurrent major retrospectives in San Francisco: Warhol Live, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum; and William Kentridge: Five Themes, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.1 The pairing was fortuitous and instructive. There could hardly be a better way than through a comparison of these two artists to illustrate the enduring aesthetic beliefs and personal values that Peter Selz brings to art.
Critic Leah Ollman characterizes Kentridge’s art in terms that would resonate with Peter’s thinking:
References to particular social and political circumstances abound in Kentridge’s films, as well as in his prints, drawings and theater productions. His art is permeated with the texture of resistance yet it remains open-ended and thus is antithetical to propaganda. While it does share with agitprop art an immediacy, emotional urgency, and accessibility, it targets no particular person, class or regime as much as the broader, erosive power of forgetting, the phenomenon of “disremembering.” The moral dimensions of memory, the discontinuities it provokes, the burden of its light (or shadow) are all present in Kentridge’s deeply affecting films.2
Her words neatly pinpoint the elements of Kentridge’s art that Peter Selz finds most compelling and expressive of his own values. Seated among the roof garden sculptures at SFMOMA, following the last of five visits to view Kentridge, Peter spoke for the record on what he learned there:
Kentridge is one of the most exciting shows of contemporary art I have seen, certainly since I saw the [Anselm] Kiefer show at MoMA some years ago. [In terms of modernism,] Kentridge has put it all together. . . . His method is located in early filmmaking. He makes films, engravings, drawings, photographs. He comes originally from the theater . . . at the same time he has all these important references to history, to politics, to art, to narration. He brings it together like nobody has done before. This man is one of the few contemporary artists who I think is a genius.
Peter went on to describe his visits to the show almost in terms of a pilgrimage, one that represents his deepest feelings about what art can and should be in the modern world:
I’ve seen this show many times, and I heard him lecture at Berkeley. In the Magic Flute he records all this light music of Papageno and shows Sarastro as the wise man of the Enlightenment. At the same time, he shows people chopping off heads as the colonialists were bringing the Enlightenment to the Dark Continent, specifically the German genocide of the natives of German Southwest Africa. . . . I think of him quite a lot, and what I see is a continuation of existentialism because, especially in The Nose—but also in other works—he’s interested in the absurd. And that’s what you see— the existential talking about action in face of the absurdity of life.3
When asked what connections he would draw between Kentridge and earlier modern art, Selz was at no loss for words on the subject. He framed his response as a challenge to Pop Art and color-field painting, two phenomena he resisted in the early 1960s:
I would say [Kentridge] is the opposite of Pop Art. And in a way, Warhol and the other Pop artists are very much like the color-field painters of the same time. . . . Marshall McLuhan called that “cool” art. “Hot” art came before, drawing from Abstract Expressionism. And Kentridge is . . . entirely on the side of “hot” art, with all kinds of energy. There is no energy that I get from a Warhol painting. Or, well . . . a painting by Frank Stella. . . . Leo Steinberg wrote an important essay in which he said the mind is part of the eye—[and I see the mind] lacking in the “cool” art.
As for the connection to earlier modernism, I was happy to read and, when [Kentridge] came to Berkeley, to hear directly of his great admiration for Beckmann. . . . I see the same deep connection to the human being and to history, the continuity of history, in Kentridge as I see in Beckmann. . . . And certainly Picasso comes to mind [and the other] great figurative artists of the twentieth century—and expressionism. But Kentridge goes back further, to Goya. And it’s that tradition which I think is most important.4
Selz wrapped up that idea with a reference to a recent conversation he’d had with his neighbor and friend Ariel. In one of their many discussions of what makes good art, how one may define it, he told her that “good art is a visual metaphor for significant human experience.”5 That, he said, was precisely the quality that was missing in the Warhol retrospective at the de Young Museum. For Peter, Kentridge has it; Warhol does not. Selz cites Kentridge as the only living artist who comes close to Kiefer in metaphorically depicting significant human experience.
Selz’s 1963 rebuke of Pop Art has clung to him throughout his career. At the time, Peter and most of his colleagues at MoMA were becoming somewhat marginalized by their resistance to new art in general.6 From a strategic career perspective, Peter now looks back at his position as unfortunate. Yet he has not entirely recanted his opposition. In fairness, MoMA was somewhat more open-minded regarding Pop than Selz’s vocal antagonism would suggest. Bill Seitz, representing the museum, acquired a Marilyn painting for $250 from Warhol’s 1964 show at the Stable Gallery. When Selz called his associate to disparage the show, asking, “Isn’t that the most ghastly thing you’ve ever seen?” Seitz purportedly responded, “Yes, isn’t it? I bought one.”7
In an ironic turn of events, Selz may prove to have been at least partly justified. Warhol, as the emperor of Pop, is undergoing rather strenuous reevaluation. His anointment as the leading heir to Marcel Duchamp is increasingly questioned.8 It is not exactly that the emperor has no clothes, but perhaps his suit is off the rack. And if the suit is the sum and substance of the art, then it may be time to question the entire enterprise. If that in fact proves to be the art-historical eventuality, the Peter Selz position, at the time unpopular, may assume the authority of prescience. However the dust on that particular issue settles, the theme in connection with Peter’s career remains valid: that is to say, Selz very often swam against the prevailing current of popular interest, critical endorsement, and even scholarly validation.
What is remarkable, and defines Selz’s position, is an unfaltering conviction about the way—his way—to approach and understand art and artists. His fundamental and frequently contrary vision of how art best functions as a worthy metaphor for “significant human experience” is unwavering. In the end, it remains the hallmark of Peter Selz’s distinctively unconventional life. Seduced by a vision of art, the Munich teenager carried it with him to his new world and found a way to apply it to his life, thereby creating a career, an identity, and a way to be in the world.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AAA 1982
Author interview with Peter Selz, July, August, and September 1982 (housed in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
Andersen interview
Author interview with Wayne Andersen, 17 January 2008
Ashton interview
Author interview with Dore Ashton, 16 February 2007
Bachert interview
Author interview with Hildegard Bachert, 15 January 2008
Carole Selz interview
Author interview with Carole Selz, 20 April 2007
Christo and Jeanne-Claude interview
Telephone interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 27 June 2007
Denes interview
Author interview with Agnes Denes, 15 January 2008
Dickinson interview
Author interview with Eleanor Dickinson, 3 January 2008
Dillenberger interview
Author interview with Jane Dillenberger, 12 June 2008
Edgar Selz interview
Author interview with Edgar Selz, 1
9 November 2007
Forbes interview
Author interview with Hannah Forbes and Peter Selz, 9 February 2008
Garcia interview
Author interview with Rupert Garcia, 3 June 2009
Hedrick interview
Author interview with Wally Hedrick, 10 and 24 June 1974
Hinckle interview
Author interview with Marianne Hinckle, 1 August 2008
McCray interview, AAA
Porter McCray in an oral history interview with Paul Cummings, 17 September–4 October 1977, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Memoir 1
Author interview with Selz, 1 September 2005
Memoir 2
Author interview with Selz, 25 August 2007
Memoir 3
Author interview with Selz, 8 November 2007
Memoir 4
Author interview with Selz, 5 December 2007
Memoir 5
Author interview with Selz, 10 March 2008
Memoir 7
Author interview with Selz, 23 June 2008
Memoir 8
Author interview with Selz, 4 August 2008
Memoir 9
Author interview with Selz, 7 January 2009
Memoir 10A
Author interview with Selz, 8 April 2009
Memoir 10B
Author interview with Selz, 22 April 2009
MoMA (Zane)
Sharon Zane interview with Selz, February 1994, for the Museum of Modern Art Oral History Project
Peter Selz Page 26