Peter Selz
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EXHIBITIONS
Pomona College
1955
The Architecture of Greene and Greene.
1956
Rico Lebrun.
1957
German Expressionist Painting, 1900–1950. Also University of California, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
1957
The Work of Buckminster Fuller.
1958
Stieglitz Circle.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1959
New Images of Man. Also Baltimore Museum of Art.
1960
Jean Tinguely: Homage to New York.
1960
Art Nouveau. Also Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art.
1961
Mark Rothko. Also London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Basel, Rome, Paris.
1961
Futurism. Also Detroit Institute of Arts and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1961
Fifteen Polish Painters. Circulated courtesy the CBS Foundation, Inc.
1961
Chagall: The Jerusalem Windows. Also Paris.
1962
The Work of Jean Dubuffet. Art Institute of Chicago and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1963
Emil Nolde. Also San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Art Museum.
1963
Auguste Rodin. In collaboration with the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
1964
Max Beckmann. Also Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Art Institute of Chicago.
1965
Alberto Giacometti. Also Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art.
University Art Museum, Berkeley
1966
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture. [First international show of kinetic art in U.S.] Also Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
1967
Funk. Also Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
1968
Hundertwasser. [First Hundertwasser exhibition in U.S.] Also Santa Barbara, Houston, Chicago, New York, Washington.
1969
The Drawings of Eric Mendelsohn. Also Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1969
Richard Lindner. [First Lindner retrospective exhibition in U.S.] Also Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
1969
De Kooning: Recent Paintings. Also Art Institute of Chicago and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1972
Harold Paris: The California Years.
1973
Ferdinand Hodler. [First major museum show of Hodler in U.S.] Also Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University.
1976
The American Presidency in Political Cartoons, 1776–1976. Sent on national tour, concluding at National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
National and International Exhibitions and Activities
1959
Selection of American Painting and Sculpture for I. Paris Biennale des Jeunes.
1961
Leonard Baskin exhibition for Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
1962
Commissioner, Committee of Selection of American Art, 31st Biennale, Venice.
1963
Selection of American Sculpture for Battersea Park Exhibition, London.
1966
Seven Decades, 1895–1965: Crosscurrents of Modern Art. Sponsored by the Public Education Association, New York; held in ten New York galleries.
1978
German and Austrian Expressionism: Art in a Turbulent Era. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Also Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
1979–80
Amerika: 2 Jahrzehnte Malerei, 1920–1940. Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf.
1979–80
2 Jahrzehnte amerikanische Malerei, 1920–1940. Kunsthaus, Zurich.
1979–80
Peinture américaine, 1920–1940. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
1980
German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Also Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
1989
Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University. Also Frederick S. Wight Gallery, UCLA; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; Albuquerque Museum of Art.
1991
Sam Francis: Blue Balls. Gagosian Gallery, New York.
1992
Max Beckmann: The Self-Portraits. Gagosian Gallery, New York.
1997
Diversity. Hugo de Pagano Gallery, New York; Bomani Gallery, San Francisco.
1997–99
Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and seven additional venues.
2001–2
Nathan Oliveira. San Jose Museum of Fine Arts and four additional venues.
2005
Atheism and Faith: The Art of Leonard Baskin. Graduate Theological Library, Berkeley, California.
2007
Robert Colescott. Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, followed by national tour.
2010
Centenary Exhibition of Morris Graves. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
2010
The Visionary Art of Morris Graves. Meridian Gallery, San Francisco.
2011
Heads. Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco.
Acknowledgments
The debts incurred by the author of a book such as this are legion. This biography relies heavily upon oral history interviews to construct a nuanced picture of its subject. The complexity of any life may not be discerned from a single source, including and perhaps especially the subject himself, and so the interview subjects are deserving of the author’s deepest gratitude. My own experience throughout this process of asking, listening, and recording has been one of grateful discovery. The net result is the illusion that I have come to know my subject intimately. That, of course, is not the case, but without the interviewees and others who have shared their own firsthand experiences and observations of Peter Selz, I would not have had the confidence to begin writing and certainly not to continue as the story became increasingly complicated and elusive.
For this gift of personal insight and knowledge I wish to introduce and applaud my main sources who were interviewed between 2007 and 2010: Wayne Andersen, Dore Ashton, Hildegard Bachert, Fletcher Benton, Gary Carson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Fr. Terrence Dempsey, Agnes Denes, Eleanor Dickinson, Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Hannah Forbes, Rupert Garcia, Marianne Hinckle, Tobi Kahn, Karl Kasten, Jerelle Kraus, Susan Landauer, Charles and Zelda Leslie, Ronald Mallory, David McKee, Karen Moss, Nathan Oliveira, Ariel Parkinson, Jack Rutberg, Elizabeth Sandvig, Carole Selz, Edgar Selz, Gabrielle Selz, Peter Selz, Tanya Selz, Norma Schlesinger, Michael Spafford, Sidra Stich, Kristine Stiles, Mary Valledor, Carlos Villa, and Norton Wisdom.
Another category of informants falls somewhere between a proper recorded interview and a phone conversation with notes taken. Often the voice contact was followed by e-mailed accounts and further phone clarification of important details. Among this important group of individual sources to be thanked are Svetlana Alpers, Jacquelynn Baas, Birgitta Wohl Baer, Kyra Baldwin, Anne Brodzky, Richard Buxbaum, James Cahill, Richard Cándida Smith, Derrick Cartwright, Enrique Chagoya, Dion Cheronis, Terri Cohn, Bruce Conner, Sophie Dannenmüller, Lorna Price Dittmer, Tom Freudenheim, Peter Gay, Nancy Genn, Mark Harrington, John Held Jr., Deborah Paris Hertz, Kevan Jenson, Mark Dean Johnson, David Jones, Paula Kirkeby, Tom Luddy, Susan Matthews, Michael Meyer, Achim Moeller, Ursula O’Farrell, Loren Partridge, Sheldon Renan, Brenda Richardson, Lawrence Rinder, Andy Stewart, William T. Wiley, and David Wright. I also thank the many others with whom I have spoken, even casually, about the project and who have made comments that, though not recorded, have shaped some part of my thinking on the subject and the time period. In fact, I owe special gratitude t
o those many friends and other generous souls who indulged me over the past several years as I took advantage of their good nature to give regular updates on my Selz progress. Several individuals read early versions of chapters and made useful, frequently significant, suggestions. Chief among these were Peter Gay, Ellen Heath, Leo Holub, Carl Landauer, Susan Landauer, Peter Mendenhall, Barry Menikoff, Michael S. Moore, Ilona Staprans, Raimonds Staprans, and David Vershure.
There were also several generously supportive funders for this project, specifically for the research and writing. For this I am particularly grateful because the book could not have been realized otherwise. Among the project funders, all friends and admirers of Peter Selz, in addition to one anonymous donor, were Douglas Adams (Graduate Theological Union), Fletcher and Bobbie Benton, Charles and Glenna Campbell, Tracey Freedman and Michael Hackett (Hackett-Freedman Gallery), Paula Kirkeby, Russ McClure, Harry Y. Oda, Harold and Gertrud Parker, Jack Stuppin, and the Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation.
The transcriber for the entire Selz Oral History Project, Debi Devitt of Pioneer Transcription Services, Penn Valley, California, took on a prodigious assignment consisting of fifty-five sessions. Included in that figure are eleven generally shorter sessions with Peter Selz conducted over the duration of the research phase. These were undertaken to augment the major oral history I conducted in 1982 for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s renowned oral history program. That key transcript, along with those for my subsequent Selz interview of 1999 and the official interviews conducted by Sharon Zane in 1994 for the official Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, constitutes the primary source material for the biography. Ms. Zane’s excellent and informative interviews with several other MoMA staff were most valuable in augmenting my own interviews. My treatment at the Museum Archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was most hospitable. For that I have to thank associate archivist Michelle Harvey, who graciously and efficiently assembled the relevant archival materials I requested, including papers of individuals as well as the Zane transcripts. Ms. Harvey was coincidentally preparing a thesis on Selz’s main associate at MoMA, William Seitz. Her subsequent and thorough handling of a key photograph inquiry seemed to me to go beyond what might ordinarily be expected. Others who were helpful with photography requests were Stephanie Cannizzo (Berkeley Art Museum), Eleanor Dickinson, Robert Emory Johnson (Chester Kessler Estate), Sue Kubly, Dennis Letbetter, Peter Mendenhall, Achim Moeller, Richard Nagler, and Jack Rutberg. Final choices for inclusion in the book came from their offerings and from Peter Selz’s own albums and scrapbooks.
Throughout this long process Peter and Carole Selz were encouraging and patient, guiding me back to the main biographical highway when I found myself tempted by picturesque side roads. Peter’s daughter Gabrielle from the outset was taken with the project, which she helped to launch as subject of the first interview in the Selz series other than her father’s. Throughout the research and writing she was available for consultation and confirmation of a wide range of family lore and facts. She also made available the tapes her mother, Thalia, and Peter recorded in 1993 and 1994 in New York and Berkeley. Their reminiscences about their life together and the failure of their marriage in New York constitute the most emotionally stirring and character-revealing documents of the entire project. Gabrielle herself was the subject of two separate interviews, one conducted in New York and the other in Berkeley. Thomas B. Selz was helpful in arranging an interview with his father, Peter’s older brother, Edgar, who died some months following at age ninety-three. Edgar was the last remaining direct link to the Selz brothers’ shared Munich past.
This brings me to the critical editorial phase of the writing and my greatest debt of all. As I was struggling to bring together the complicated components of a hybrid biography—seeking a way to effectively join multiple interview quotes with the many people, events, times, and themes that provide the context for Selz’s life—my wife, Ann Heath Karlstrom, took notice and, with spousal compassion along with an understandable measure of trepidation, stepped in. As editorial consultant and book development editor, she brought to the project the considerable experience of her years as director of publications at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as well as having patiently listened to me as I narrated the progress of the research. As her colleague at the University of California Press, Deborah Kirshman, the guiding light of this endeavor from the beginning, told me, “She is exactly what you and this book need.” Deborah was, as is usually the case, right on the mark. I am grateful to Deborah and to her colleagues at the press: Kari Dahlgren, Sue Heinemann, Eric Schmidt, Claudia Smelser, Heather Vaughan, and Jacqueline Volin. Also, Anne Canright provided a welcome and thorough final edit of the manuscript. The book owes a great deal to the professionalism of these individuals. Finally, Jeff Gunderson, librarian at the San Francisco Art Institute, deserves special appreciation for agreeing late in the process to prepare the selected Selz bibliography and exhibition history.
Index
Fig. and Figs. refer to the gathered illustration section.
Abbott, John E., 234n11
About Drawing (exhibition), 190
Abstract Classicism, 43–45
Abstract Expressionism: in BAM collection, 139; expressive figuration juxtaposed to, 74–77; figurative work in, 34, 63–64, 70; gestural painting as analogue to, 240–41n14; Guston’s work as, 103–4; narrative of, 59–62; Pop Art compared with, 105–6, 230n21; public interest in, 46; in San Francisco, 156, 240–41n14; Seitz’s scholarship on, 52; suspicions about, in 1960s, 229n12; triumph at Venice Biennale (1964), 60, 221–22n26. See also German Expressionism; New York School of painting
abstraction: geometric, 42; German Expressionism and move toward, 29; Rothko and importance of, 85; struggle to find verbal language for, 86–87, 225–26n35. See also Abstract Expressionism; German Expressionism; New York School of painting
ACA (gallery), 181
Acton, Arlo, 128
Adler, Felix, 18
aesthetics: authorship, originality, and the machine-made in, 101–2; beauty in, 82, 192; form and content working together in, 100; Hard Edge painting and, 43–44; individual and subjective vs. communal and objective in, 34; New York self-consciousness and, 41; spiritual search for soul linked to, 130–31, 163, 173–77; subjectivity emphasized in, 71, 104–5; surface vs. depth in, 101–2. See also art and politics connections; figurative work; humanist position; “living the art life”; modernist art
Ahmanson, Howard, 39, 40
Albers, Josef, 35, 105
Alberto Giacometti (exhibition), 72, 92, 95–96
Alexander, Robert, 245n4
Alloway, Lawrence, 44
Alpers, Svetlana, 139
Alphonse Berber Gallery, 181, 203
Alte Pinakothek (Munich), 4–5, 205
Altman, Ralph, 41
Altoon, John, 42
American Impressionists, 103
American Place (N.Y.C.), 19–20
American Veterans Committee (AVC), 38
Amyx, Dick, 144
Andersen, Wayne: career of, 161, 170; on Rothko estate trial, 168–69, 243n59; on Selz, 170–73, 244nn66–68; works: Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine, 170, 244n64; German Artists and Hitler’s Mind, 170; Marcel Duchamp, 172–73, 244n71
Anderson, Jeremy, 128
André, Carl, 202
Angelico, Fra, 120
Anglim, Paule, 131
Anna Halprin dancers, Fig. 19, 124–25
Anonymous Was a Woman (organization), 162, 242n39
Antin, Eleanor, 158
anti-Semitism: in Cheronis family, 113; experiences downplayed, 65–68, 106; in New York vs. Germany, 21. See also Nazism (National Socialist Party)
Appel, Karl, 78
ARC (Society for Art, Religion, and Culture), 173–74
Ariel. See Parkinson, Ariel
Arneson, Robert, 128, 142
art and politics connections: Andersen’s comments on, 171, 244n66, 244n68; anti
-war stance in, 24, 217n36; Ashton and Selz’s friendship in, 164–65; Berkeley as center of, 133–34; Chicano connections in, 187–89, 247n27; feminism and, 157, 241nn20–21; Free Speech Movement and, 119–20, 123, 233n3, 247n32; immigration and changes in, 15–16; independent outsiders in, 161; influences on exhibitions and, 59–60; as key focus, xi–xii; Pomona students’ awareness of, 38; retirement activities focused on, 190–91, 196–200; Simon and Selz, compared, 145–46; youthful direction in, 7–8. See also Art of Engagement (Selz); “living the art life”; Werkleute (Working People)
art brut. See Dubuffet, Jean
art critics: controversy and reviews of New Images of Man exhibition, 63, 75–78, 172, 222n32, 223n5, 223–24n6, 224n12, 248n29; post-WWII art as purview of, 151–52; Selz’s view of role of, 100–101. See also artist-critic-curator-dealer nexus
art dealers and galleries: Germans as, in New York City, 20, 22, 28; later activities in association with, 181–82, 190–91, 195–96, 201, 203; Rothko estate trial and, 165–69; Selz’s view of, 166, 168, 243nn60–61; Venice Biennale (1964) and, 60. See also artist-critic-curator-dealer nexus; art market
Artforum (journal), 129
art history: as academic discipline, 69, 151; artist-focused and object-oriented approach (biographical) to, 149–50, 152–53; connoisseurship vs. contextual approaches in, 29; cultural and intellectual approach (antibiographical) to, 94, 151, 152, 153, 157; empathy with artists in, 37–38; oral history method in, 158; post-WWII art excluded from, 151–52; professional organization for, 40–41; Selz as outsider in, 152, 171–72; Selz’s view of role of, 100–101; Selz’s voice in, 200–205; standard textbook of, 159–60; ultrareactionary attitudes toward, 39–40. See also students; teaching; UC-Berkeley art history department