Peter Selz
Page 27
Oliveira interview
Author interview with Nathan Oliveira, 7 September 1980
Spafford/Sandvig interview
Author interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, 25 July 2008
Stiles interview
Author telephone interview with Kristine Stiles, 25 June 2008
Thalia Tapes
Taped conversations between Peter and Thalia Selz, November 1993 and July 1994
PREFACE
1. The improvisational nature of Banyan’s music matches Norton Wisdom’s free-form painting, recalling the collaborative performances of the 1950s involving jazz and Abstract Expressionist gestural painting.
2. Author phone interview with Norton Wisdom, 25 November 2009. Selz’s receptivity to new and shifting cultural phenomena is evident in the “Countercultural Trends” chapter of his book Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). The section on the punk movement, which Selz was not overly familiar with, benefited from his conversations with people, no doubt including Bruce Conner, who were enthusiasts themselves. That included the author of this book, who introduced Selz to the garage band X, which, coincidentally, established its national reputation at the Whisky a Go Go. As it happened, according to Wisdom (phone conversation, 10 June 2010), X’s singer Exene Cervenka was among the artists in attendance at the same Banyan concert.
3. Author phone conversation with Charles and Zelda Leslie, Bloomington, Indiana, 6 May 2008. Charles Leslie was a fellow student at the University of Chicago and a professor of anthropology at Pomona College when Selz was on the faculty. The couples were very close, and Peter has kept in touch. Charles died in 2009.
4. Author interview with Gabrielle Selz, Berkeley, 16 April 2007.
5. Roberta Smith, “Martín Ramírez: Outside In,” New York Times, 26 January 2007.
6. From the citation for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award presented to Peter Selz for Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. Selz has had a close relationship with the University of California Press over the years as the author of several books and collaborator on others. The award jury was chaired by William Wallace, Washington University (St. Louis). The quotation here is slightly edited and abridged.
7. The entire Selz Biography Oral History Project, both digital recordings and transcripts, have been accepted into the collection of the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
1. CHILDHOOD
1. Peter explains that the American immigration people required a second name. A friend had told him he looked like the actor Leslie Howard. Not wanting to use the German-sounding Hanns, and with Howard also starting with an H, the young arrival chose Howard. Professionally for years he used Peter H. Selz.
2. Author interview with Selz, Berkeley, 8 November 2007; hereafter referred to as Memoir 3. Other memoirs are indicated by their numbers, with dates indicated at first entry. Most of the quotations in this book come from a series of interviews conducted by the author with Selz and many individuals important to his life and career.
3. Memoir 3, 49.
4. Ibid., 28–29.
5. Ibid., 45.
6. Ibid., 30.
7. Memoir 4 (5 December 2007), 16.
8. Ibid., 16–17.
9. As recounted by Peter’s friend Marianne Hinckle, phone conversation, 21 February 2008. Selz was pleased to have this detail added; he had evidently forgotten telling Hinckle the story years earlier.
10. Edgar Selz interview, Laguna Woods, Calif., 19 November 2007, 21; hereafter Edgar Selz interview. Memoir 3, 29; Memoir 4, 2–3. According to Peter, his grandfather was admired by the great Rembrandt scholar Jakob Rosenberg, who purportedly told Peter, “The most I ever learned about art was not at the university but from your grandfather” (Memoir 3, 32).
11. Memoir 2 (25 August 2007), 4–5.
12. Memoir 3, 30–31.
13. Edgar Selz interview, 35–36.
14. Memoir 3, 41.
15. Several books include mention of these groups, German and Jewish, but few seem to consider fully the way in which they were used to manipulate young minds in the service of national goals. Among the notable exceptions is Peter Gay’s memoir, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). In a sense, Peter’s innocent Munich youth and the intimations of the horrors on the way seem to come together in the Werkleute and the urgent, soon desperate, circumstances that determined its purpose and agenda within the Jewish community.
16. Memoir 4, 4–5.
17. Edgar Selz interview, 35.
18. Memoir 3, 34.
19. Selz, Art of Engagement, 25.
20. Memoir 3, 56.
21. Memoir 4, 5–6.
22. Memoir 3, 15–16.
23. Two excellent books on this subject, both of which locate the rise of Hitler, right-wing radicalism, and anti-Semitism within the Weimar Republic, are Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture: The Outsider and Insider (1968; New York: Norton, 2001) and Eric D. Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 2007).
24. Memoir 3, 16.
25. Memoir 4, 7.
26. Ibid., 8.
27. Memoir 3, 12. Weimar politician Walter Rathenau (Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, assassinated in 1922) famously observed that sometime in his or her youth, each and every German Jew realizes “he is a second-class citizen” (quoted in Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present [Boston: Beacon Press, 1984], 10). Heilbut provides a useful summary guide to Peter Selz’s immigration story, including his enthusiastic embrace of America and his summary dropping of the German language. The importance of language as a way to maintain German identity is discussed by Heilbut (89). The other side of the language coin, the hostility that met the German language, especially after the United States entered the war, is mentioned by Jarrell C. Jackman in the introduction to The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930–1945, ed. Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 19.
28. Memoir 3, 13.
29. Memoir 3, 2.
30. Edgar Selz interview, 21.
2. NEW YORK
1. Memoir 3, 13–14.
2. Sharon Zane interview with Selz, February 1994, for the Museum of Modern Art Oral History Project, 5; hereafter MoMA (Zane).
3. Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The experience of getting out of Germany for the Fröhlich family (surname changed to Gay—one meaning of fröhlich—upon entering the United States) was harrowing. Peter Gay credits his father for his tenacity and creative responses to essential harassment that finally delivered him and his family to the less than welcoming United States (this was 1939, when the quotas had been tightened).
4. Memoir 3, 20, 21–22.
5. Edgar Selz interview, 34.
6. Ibid., 26.
7. Author interview with Hildegard Bachert, New York, 15 January 2008, 4, 5; hereafter Bachert interview.
8. Author interview with Hannah Forbes and Peter Selz, Marina del Rey, Calif., 9 February 2008; hereafter Forbes interview. (Some of the interview is condensed in the following quotes.)
9. Forbes interview, 27.
10. Ibid., 30.
11. Ibid., 31.
12. Ibid., 33. Hildegard says she came to the United States with the name, made up by her group in Germany because they disliked the Germanic “Hildegard” (letter, 1 October 2010).
13. Memoir 3, 4.
14. Ibid. Some online genealogies list Drey’s death in 1930.
15. Bachert interview, 3, 6, 8.
16. Ibid., 20–21, 23, 24. Hildegard describes a social life that increasingly included “superficial parties, drinking, and small talk that put me off.” Selz (e-mail to author, 9 August 2009)
strenuously objects to this characterization, pointing out that at the time he was often working the night shift at his sponsors’ brewery in Bushwick. Instead, he attributes her breaking off the engagement to a romantic attachment she had with an art dealer.
17. Bachert interview, 34.
18. Ibid., 29.
19. Author interview with Peter Selz, Berkeley, Calif., July, August, and September 1982 (housed in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), 5; hereafter AAA 1982.
20. MoMA (Zane), 4. An almost identical account appears in the 1982 interview for the Archives of American Art. It is evident that in Selz’s mind his long professional career began with these early experiences.
21. AAA 1982, 5.
22. Ibid., 5–6.
23. MoMA (Zane), 5.
24. Memoir 3, 3–4.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. AAA 1982, 7.
27. MoMA (Zane), 7–8.
28. Memoir 3, 24. Parades and Nazi regalia were not forbidden in New York City until after March 1938, when the Nazi government declared that no Reichsdeutsche (Germans living abroad) could be members of the German-American Bund, and no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization. Nonetheless, on 20 February 1939, a Bund rally at Madison Square Garden had an attendance of 20,000. See Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924– 1941 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974).
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 28.
31. AAA 1982, 6–7.
32. Ibid., 7–8. The Donahues were among Selz’s first close non-Jewish American-born friends, and presumably represent a widening of his social milieu. Selz credits Donahue’s first teaching position as contributing to his awareness that one could make a living from the study of art and art history.
33. Memoir 4, 17.
34. Memoir 4, 17.
35. E-mail from Peter Selz to the author, 8 August 2009.
36. Selz has remained consistent in his antiwar position.
37. Peter Selz phone conversation with the author, 2 October 2008. For the story of OSS involvement (after having achieved grudging British approval to take part in their operations), see Colin Beavan’s Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow War (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006). I am also indebted to Meredith Wheeler for sharing information from her own study of Operation Jedburgh and other OSS covert operations in France (e-mail, 29 November 2010).
38. Selz phone conversation, 2 October 2008.
3. CHICAGO TO POMONA
1. MoMA (Zane), 10.
2. AAA 1982, 10.
3. Ibid., 14. Selz also acknowledges Ernest Scheier at Wayne State University, Detroit, as an early authority who knew a lot and “was helpful” (ibid., 15).
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Memoir 2, 4–5.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 6.
8. The other modern art dissertation, on Cubism, was written by Herschel B. Chipp at Columbia, who also ended up at the University of California, Berkeley. Peter remembers meeting Herschel at one of the College Art Association meetings while he was at Pomona, and Herschel later wrote a long, generally positive review of German Expressionist Painting in Art Bulletin 41, no. 1 (March 1959): 123–24. After Selz’s arrival at Berkeley in 1965, and especially through the 1970s, he and Chipp were the art history department modernists. Peter says he and Herschel eventually split the teaching of the history of twentieth-century modernism: “[We] shared the students doing their graduate work in modern art. And it was an extremely interesting combination. . . . Herschel was the more methodical. I was more explorative and paid more attention to new ideas, which then had to be rectified and put in context” (Memoir 10A [8 April 2009], 1).
9. Memoir 2, 6.
10. AAA 1982, 11.
11. Ibid.
12. MoMA (Zane), 11–12.
13. AAA 1982, 13, 17; additional details provided in e-mail communication, 9 January 2010.
14. Ibid. Selz’s attraction to the work of Beckmann was immediate and introduced a fifteen-year study of the artist, culminating in a 1964 Museum of Modern Art book and exhibition (in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago). His long essay in Max Beckmann is among Selz’s most compelling artist treatments. A sense of immediacy and interaction (as in conversation) seems to be typical when he had direct personal access to his subject. This quality informs and enlivens some of Selz’s best writing, growing as it does from his keen interest in people as individuals.
15. Selz in “Modernism Comes to Chicago,” originally published in Art in Chicago, 1945–1995 (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), reprinted in Selz, Beyond the Mainstream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 196.
16. AAA 1982, 16.
17. Ibid., 16. The Selz scrapbook for the 1940s and 1950s (Peter Selz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution) contains a few reviews, an announcement, and the catalogue for the summer 1947 exhibition. In the 1982 interview, Selz said: “I did a show of Chicago art. . . . I saw all of the Chicago artists and selected a show of forty pictures.” In fact, as Selz acknowledges in the small catalogue for the show, this was a collaborative effort by the Student Committee (of which he was chair) of the Renaissance Society, in which students selected the artists who then submitted works. Selz wrote in the foreword that “the exhibition though small in number is large in scope, illustrating many trends in contemporary art.” These ran from “traditional” realism through “Midwest style” and Expressionism to Surrealism and abstract art, including a nonobjective example from “the late Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.” It is likely that Selz provided the informed art-historical framework for the show. Among the few familiar names, in addition to Moholy-Nagy, were Aaron Bohrod and Felix Ruvolo, as well as African American artists Archibald Motley Jr. and Eldzier Cortor.
18. Frank Holland, “World of Art: Society Opens Exhibition of Chicago Art,” undated and unidentified clipping, Selz scrapbook, 1940s–1950s.
19. AAA 1982, 16–17.
20. Ibid., 18.
21. MoMA (Zane), 13–14.
22. AAA 1982, 17. This revised notion of a heretofore homogeneous Bauhaus style and program was the subject of a recent exhibition, Bauhaus 1919– 1933: Workshops for Modernity, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (8 November 2009–25 January 2010).
23. AAA 1982, 18.
24. Ibid., 19.
25. Ibid.
26. Author interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, Seattle, 25 July 2008, 9, 13; hereafter Spafford/Sandvig interview.
27. Ibid., 26.
28. Ibid., 51.
29. Ibid., 23.
30. Ibid.
31. Phone conversation with Charles and Zelda Leslie, 5 May 2008.
32. Spafford/Sandvig interview, 23.
33. Phone conversation with Charles and Zelda Leslie, 5 May 2008.
34. AAA 1982, 19–20.
35. Ibid., 21.
36. Panel discussion, Laguna Art Museum, 15 March 2009: “Alternate Universe: 1950s and 1960s—Los Angeles and the Claremont Group.” Panelists: Paul Karlstrom, moderator; Jack Zajac, Doug McClellan, Paul Darrow, and Tony DeLap.
37. AAA 1982, 21.
38. Ibid., 22.
39. Spafford/Sandvig interview, 25.
40. MoMA (Zane), 2–21.
41. Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, “Freeways,” in Los Angeles A to Z (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 157–61.
42. For the authoritative source on this cultural phenomenon in Southern California, see Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also her more recent contribution on the subject, A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
43. AAA 1982, 26–27.
44. Ibid., 22–23.
45. Ibid., 30.
46. Ibid., 31.
47. Ibid.<
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4. BACK IN NEW YORK
1. AAA 1982, 31.
2. Ibid.
3. MoMA (Zane), 26.
4. Ibid., 27–28.
5. New York MoMA certainly deserves the title of “greatest.” As for first, Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme (1920) precedes MoMA by almost a decade, with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (1921), just behind. Established by Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray as the “first experimental museum for contemporary art,” the Société in conceptual vision trumped MoMA as a bastion of the avantgarde. For an informative treatment of the history and superb collection of the first truly great modern art endeavor, see The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Press, 2006).
6. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago and New York: Contemporary Books, 1989). The fascinating story of the “founding mothers,” starting with several pages devoted to Abby Aldrich, appears on pages 59–65. The key role of women at MoMA emerges, but it is not an explicit focus. The history of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism at this all-white male Christian institutional enclave appears only in fragmentary fashion elsewhere. Given the importance of Selz’s position at MoMA and his sometimes controversial exhibitions, as well as the fact that he was discovered by Barr, it is surprising that Selz is not mentioned in Marquis’s biography. In effect, hers is an abbreviated, somewhat superficial history of MoMA. For a more thoughtful (if less lively and anecdotal), art-historically informed account, see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
7. Marquis, Alfred H. Barr Jr., 63–64. Paul Sachs was secure in his choice, and he had the respect of the committee planning the new museum.
8. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr Jr., 364. Barr’s problems with the board and the circumstance of his firing are presented with insight and nuance by Kantor (see epilogue, 354–77). With her exclusive emphasis on Barr, as in Marquis’s biography, Kantor gives curators short shrift, further enhancing the Barr legend. Neither Selz nor associate curator William Seitz appears in the index. Dorothy Miller appears seven times, including a section pretty much her own titled “American Artists Find Their Champion” (234–39). Although she played an early role in recognizing trends in American art, in the 1960s Selz and Seitz, among a few others, were the curators who mounted the significant exhibitions.