3. Peter Selz was but one of the players in the kaleidoscopic picture of 1960s Manhattan painted by Perl. The role of the Museum of Modern Art is prominently discussed, including the influence of the Art Nouveau exhibition (“landmark in the history of taste,” p. 383) that Peter conceived and initiated with a team of specialist curators. Selz’s New Images of Man exhibition (1959) is mentioned twice (pp. 412 and 503), in each instance as if it represented Alfred Barr’s interests and ideas about the role of MoMA in relation to contemporary art. These exhibitions are discussed almost as if they were formed by committee—as if the institution made the decisions and selections, rather than the curators. Selz’s recollections differ on that important point. Many living artists remember New Images as a major statement against the Abstract Expressionist status quo as finally embraced by MoMA. The idea of who is in the leadership position—artists or institutions—is a major theme in Perl’s book.
4. Fred Kaplan reviewing the Acquavella Galleries’ exhibition of forty-four works from the former Scull collection in the New York Times, 10 April 2010, C1. In his introduction to Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Steven Henry Madoff further describes the changed and changing situation: “What was publicized and debated was driven by a rising power nexus in the art world of new collectors (most notably the Sculls) and dealers such as Leo Castelli, Virginia Dwan, and Sidney Janis” (xv).
5. By 1962 various critics were writing about the New Realism, also identified as Neo-Dada, under the name Pop Art. In addition to Sidney Tillim in Arts Magazine, February 1962, 34–37, most of the other leading critics weighed in. John Canaday, two years later, as usual carved out the most conservative position: “But whatever Pop is—its patrons and practitioners are still haggling over definitions—it has arrived and gives every sign of staying around at least for a little while. Whether or not Pop is a new art, and whether or not it can last, it has supplied a new bandwagon. And in the art circus as it operates today, that is the final accolade of success” (“Pop Art Sells On and On—Why?” New York Times Magazine, 31 May 1964, 7ff.). Ironically, this may well have matched pretty closely the view of Peter Selz, who was definitely no fan of Canaday. Among the other writers paying attention in 1962 were Max Kozloff (“Pop Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians,” Art International, March 1962, 35–36); Brian O’Doherty (“Art: Avantgarde Revolt,” New York Times, 31 October 1962, 41); and, from the West Coast, Jules Langsner (“Los Angeles Letter,” Art International, September 1962, 49). Langsner was reviewing the historic exhibition New Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum. This show was distinguished by the inclusion of artists from California, notably Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha, whose work Peter Selz had become acquainted with during his few years at Pomona.
6. John Canaday, “Art That Pulses, Quivers, and Fascinates,” New York Times, 21 February 1965, Sunday magazine, 12.
7. Sidney Tillim, “Further Observations on the Pop Phenomenon,” Artforum, November 1965, 17–19; reprinted in Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History, 137.
8. Ibid., 139n2.
9. Henry Geldzahler, quoted in “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts, April 1963, 37.
10. Hilton Kramer, quoted ibid., 38.
11. Perl, New Art City, 454, 454n37.
12. Thomas B. Hess, Art News, December 1962, 12; quoted ibid., 453). The “old fogies” apparently included many of the Abstract Expressionists, but there was also room for museum curators—including a few at MoMA—and others associated with the established order. Peter Selz may well have been among them. Certainly his romantic humanism and sense of social engagement ran counter to the material-focused and antiphilosophical empiricism that was taking over the New York art world (see Perl’s chapter titled “The Empirical Imagination: Beginning Again,” 493–528). The emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, together with the personal expression, an allusive quality Selz looked for in both abstract and figurative art, became increasingly suspect in the early 1960s.
13. Peter Selz, “The Flaccid Art” (mistitled “Pop Goes the Artist”), Partisan Review 30, no. 3 (Summer 1963): 316.
14. Richard Dorment, “What Is an Andy Warhol?” New York Review of Books 56, no. 16 (22 October 2009): 14–18. Dorment discusses Arthur Danto’s Andy Warhol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Tony Sherman and David Dalton’s Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: Harper, 2009), and Richard Polsky’s I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) (New York: Other Press, 2009).
15. Arthur C. Danto, quoted in Dorment, “What Is an Andy Warhol?” 14.
16. Horst Weber von Beeren, cited ibid., 16. In this disregard for the authorial control of art production, Warhol was anticipated slightly by Salvador Dalí, whom he acknowledged as an influence.
17. Andy Warhol, quoted ibid.
18. AAA 1982, 46.
19. Ibid., 47.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 48. The distance between what was meant by the New Realism and Selz’s New Images of Man is evident in critic Sidney Tillim’s definition of the New Realism as “anti-expressionist and anti-rhetorical” (Arts, March 1963; quoted in Perl, New Art City, 505). The “anti-expressionist” part alone would have been sufficient to turn Peter off.
22. AAA 1982, 50.
23. Ibid.
24. Perl, New Art City, 391–432 (a chapter titled “Going to the Modern”).
25. The 1960s, as the time of abandoning the ideals of high art and seeing the world through low-art goggles, are central to a number of careers that sought to reconcile high and low at MoMA and elsewhere. Many years after the appearance of Pop, the new chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Kirk Varnedoe, attempted to do just that with his controversial exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990). This ambitious blockbuster, co-directed by writer Adam Gopnik, opened to a critical “thrashing” (Grace Glueck, New York Times, 3 December 1990). Among the criticisms was that it imposed too strict an order on a sprawling topic and that the “low art” actually became partially domesticated within the institutional setting. In some respects, the initial hostile critical reception recalled the response to Peter’s New Images of Man. Both exhibitions fared better with the public.
Peter was among those caught between potent and competing 1960s cultural forces, which inevitably had an effect on his career. Open though he was to new forms of authentic expression, he required that art encompass not just serious ideas but also knowledge of the history that made that art possible. The visual arts, whether in the hands of Donald Judd, Fairfield Porter, or Frank Stella, remained attached to an elitist vision of high art and culture that kept it separate from authentic popular manifestations. A still younger generation of artists simply wanted their own pool to swim in. But despite the fact that many of them adopted rock and roll as their soundtrack, pop songs did not immediately supplant jazz, considered the appropriate accompaniment to Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1950s, as advanced art’s musical equivalent. In this distinction between contemporary fine art and popular (mass entertainment) forms, a degree of elitism lingered.
26. Hess, “Editorial: Notes on American Museums,” 27.
27. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 418. Further light on the circumstances of Peter’s departure is provided by Director of Public Information Elizabeth Shaw: “I do remember that, with René’s assent, he stayed on four or five months . . . in order to qualify for some kind of pension rights. René said it would be silly for him to leave in January, if by staying until May he would be entitled to something” (interview with Sharon Zane, MoMA Oral History Project, October/November 1991, 101).
28. Selz has commented several times during our conversations on the lack of friendliness among the staff at MoMA, returning to a wistful complaint that appeared in his 1994 interview with Sharon Zane (83): “I remember [thinking]— shortly before I left—Do any of these people spend their evenings together? .
. . Do any of them ever invite each other to dinner? No.” After reviewing the first draft of this book, Selz cautioned me: “Tone down my great optimism about MoMA. Yes I was able to do good things, but it wasn’t all that rosy. There was respect among the curators, but not much friendship” (undated note to author).
29. Walter Bareiss interviewed by Sharon Zane, MoMA Oral History Project, September/October 1991, 87. Bareiss moved into the Modern Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions Department after Selz and Seitz departed.
30. Helen M. Franc interviewed by Sharon Zane, MoMA Oral History Project, April/May/June 1991, 168.
31. Ibid., 199.
32. Alicia Legg interviewed by Sharon Zane, MoMA Oral History Project, June/October 1991, 45.
33. Frances Pernas interviewed by Sharon Zane, MoMA Oral History Project, July 1994, 53. Pernas was publications manager from 1940 to 1962. She worked closely with curatorial staff, including Selz and Seitz, on catalogues. She remarked that Seitz was the better writer, but Selz was better organized.
34. Memorandum to Peter Selz from Richard H. Koch (Deputy Director and General Counsel), 20 January 1961; MoMA Archives (RdH, iv.2i78).
35. Conversation with Peter Selz, San Francisco, 30 April 2009.
36. The Seitz-Selz working relationship at MoMA appears to have been complicated, as René d’Harnoncourt cautioned Peter it might be before Seitz was hired. However, there is ample evidence that they enjoyed a warm personal friendship in the beginning. In a letter to Peter and Thalia dated 27 July 1960, Seitz exults about his upcoming job at MoMA: “It is not simply the Museum, or New York, but the unique possibilities I feel we have, for reasons I can’t quite explain, working together.” The letter is signed “Love (and that includes Irma).” William Seitz Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
37. Taped conversations between Peter and Thalia Selz, November 1993 and July 1994. According to daughter Gabrielle (e-mail to author, 11 May 2009), the first three sessions were recorded at her old apartment on 12th Street in New York City; the others were taped at the Selz residence in Berkeley. Quotations in the text that are not cited are from these recorded conversations, hereafter referred to as Thalia Tapes. Throughout the tapes, Thalia assumed the role of interviewer and narrator.
38. Telephone conversation with Selz, 15 May 2009.
39. E-mail from Dion Cheronis, 17 December 2009.
40. Memoir 9, 13.
41. Ibid., 14.
42. Norma Schlesinger’s account has her, with her two boys in tow, departing without prior notice, her reason being the steady string of women who paraded through their marriage. She reiterated in her interview what Selz’s other wives and lovers have stated was the main obstacle to a continuing relationship with him: Peter’s refusal to understand that “extracurricular” connections, whether or not he considered them “serious,” undermine essential trust in the primary relationship. Author interview with Norma Schlesinger, San Francisco, 7 March 2008, 18.
43. Memoir 9, 15.
44. Ibid., 19–20.
45. In the tapes, Thalia freely acknowledges that she had lovers.
46. Memoir 9, 28–29.
47. The manuscript that Gabrielle Selz allowed me to read was a draft, which she has classified as a work of autobiographical fiction.
48. Author interview with Tanya Selz, 26 February 2008.
49. Author interview with Peter and Gabrielle Selz, 15 February 2007, 6. She has often said that this father-daughter tradition, visiting museums and talking about art—i.e., being admitted to the world that matters to him the most—is what she especially values in their often troubled relationship.
50. E-mail from Gabrielle Selz, 11 May 2009. Perhaps more interesting in connection with parental love is her comment “We were just like houseplants. Water them every other day, and then leave them alone” (telephone conversation, 10 May 2009).
51. Letter from Thalia Selz to Peter Selz in Europe, 13 July 1964, New York. Communication #13, Thalia Selz papers, housed with Gabrielle Selz (estate of Thalia Cheronis Selz).
52. Thalia Selz journal entry for 12 January 1965; Thalia Selz papers.
53. Thalia Tapes.
54. Letter from Thalia to Peter in Europe, 2 July 1964; Thalia Selz papers.
55. Letter from Thalia to Peter, 13 July 1964; Thalia Selz papers.
56. Memoir 9, 13.
57. Peter’s attempts at reconciliation with Thalia in Berkeley failed. But to this day he wishes they could have found a solution to their troubled marriage. He saw Thalia in many ways as his “soul mate.” According to daughter Gabrielle, Thalia and Peter tried over the years to reconcile: “They stayed really connected. They worked on projects together . . . like a Greek-American art show at the Queens Museum about eight years ago [ca. 2000]” (Author interview with Gabrielle Selz, New York, 15 February 2007, 22–23).
7. BERKELEY
1. AAA 1982, 67. In the interviews conducted for the Archives of American Art during the summer and fall of 1982, almost ten years after he retired as museum director, Peter provided an informative account of his adventures in pursuit of those goals at the museum during his directorship, 1965–72 (pp. 54–72).
2. Ibid., 55.
3. For a thorough and up-to-date account of the Berkeley protest movement of the 1960s, see Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The author of this first biography of Savio is also co-editor, with Reginald E. Zelnik, of The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). A personal account of encountering the Free Speech Movement memorial, discreetly set in the pavement of Sproul Plaza, the placement and design reflecting Selz’s participation and advice, is offered by artist Hassel Smith’s stepson, painter Mark Harrington: “Peter told me this was a memorial to Mario Savio. . . . He described his own commitment at the time, newly arrived from NYC and committed to the student initiatives and their meaning. I found this moving in many ways, given Peter’s own experience of repression as a youth in Nazi Germany . . . and the engagement of my stepfather, then teaching as a guest artist at UCB. He actively supported the students—as did Peter” (e-mail to author, 26 April 2010).
4. AAA 1982, 55.
5. Ciampi’s “radical” brutalist concrete building shared familial traits with several other 1960s and 1970s museum designs, chief among them Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum (1966) in New York and Gordon Bunshaft’s (Skid-more, Owings & Merrill) doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum (1974) on the Mall in Washington, D.C., none of which has stood the test of time. In “Artful Way to Expand a Museum,” New York Times, Arts sec., 12, Roberta Smith describes the now evident shortcomings of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Madison Avenue building—many of which apply as well to the University Art Museum.
6. Peter Selz, 2006 notes toward an essay solicited for a book titled Living with Artists that was never published.
7. Author interview with Norma Schlesinger, San Francisco, 7 March 2008. Schlesinger wrote an account of her relationship with Mark Rothko, which she offered to share. However, she was in the final stages of terminal cancer when we conducted the interview, and died less than a month after; the written account was never sent. Although much of her interview was marked by bitterness toward her former husband, by the end of it she softened somewhat and acknowledged that, despite the marital difficulties, she retained some warm memories of and feelings for Peter (transcript pp. 22–23, as well as post-recording conversation).
8. Ibid., 22–23. Peter says Rothko gave him the red painting in recognition of his curating the Rothko retrospective.
9. Peter Selz, Living with Artists notes.
10. AAA 1982, 61.
11. For a colorful account of the truly inspired creation of the MoMA film library, the “event that had the greatest impact upon the Museum and its future,” see Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 108–14. F
or example: Iris Barry—“an extremely handsome Englishwoman in her late thirties with navy blue eyes, fine features in a long oval face, and shining black hair”—impressed architect and MoMA board member Phillip Johnson so much that he not only offered to pay her salary as MoMA’s first librarian but also gave her money to buy a dress at Saks Fifth Avenue (ibid., 110).
It was convenient that a film library was in the original prospectus for the new museum. Iris Barry’s new husband, John E. Abbott, was appointed director of the Film Library, although Iris, as curator, actually ran the film program. Sexism has certainly played a role in MoMA’s history. Some have made similar charges about the early years at Berkeley’s UAM, among them former director Jacquelynn Baas (e-mail, 2 May 2010).
12. Renan and Langlois met in 1968; in 1969 Selz and Langlois signed an agreement setting out their shared goals. Lee Amazonas, “Guerrilla Cinema-theque Comes of Age: The Pacific Film Archive,” Chronicle of the University of California, no. 6 (Spring 2004), 147–49. Sheldon Renan, quoted in a February 1971 interview that introduces Amazonas’s essay.
13. Sheldon Renan, e-mail to the author, 11 July 2010.
14. Phone interview with Tom Luddy, 9 July 2010. Still angry about the university’s treatment of him, Peter, and PFA, Luddy seems to particularly resent dean Roderic Park and Edward Feder, both of whom “hated Peter.” According to Luddy, the administration considered PFA “illegal.” Furthermore, again according to Luddy, film was supposed to have been based at the Los Angeles campus. In 1980, frustrated and humiliated by the administration’s treatment of him, Luddy quit and accepted a job offer from Francis Ford Coppola. As director of PFA, he was “going broke,” paid less than the union wages of janitors and slide projectionists.
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