Peter Selz (11 page)

While acknowledging the need for approval of the board in connection with exhibitions, Selz emphasizes that it was not binding. He credits the director for preserving an enviable degree of curatorial independence at MoMA, using a personal example:

 

That was a matter of the [effective] way d'Harnoncourt [dealt with the board]. For example, the trustees wanted at least every other year a late-nineteenth-century show, an “old master” show. And they generally wanted reflections of their own tastes and, frankly, investments. So they always wanted a show of Vlaminck, Derain, or Dufy. But we didn't do it. I remember one time I said, “All right, if you want late nineteenth century, I'll do a show of Symbolists.” And I did: Redon, Bresdin, and Gustave Moreau. And I had three other people actually curate the show. So that is how we compromised, and it was a wonderful show, these three artists together. The Moreau part was done by Dore Ashton, Bresdin by Harold Joachim, and Redon by John Rewald. That's how we handled it. I remember other curators coming to town, needing to borrow things for shows at their museums, and frequently they would say, “Well, the board has asked me to do such and such a show.” That was never the policy at the Modern. It really was a good place.
²²

Several questions arise from Selz's generally positive recollection of the working environment at MoMA. The first concerns the friendly relationships between departments and staff. Retrospectively it may well be that, for Peter, the ideal of modernist art as common cause allowed him to overlook the familiar workplace phenomena of personal ambition and strategic action to achieve a competitive edge. There is no question that such tension obtains in the nonprofit world of fine arts where power and
prestige are the available measures of success. Is it possible that the situation wasn't as sunny as Selz recalls? Second, the almost utopian respect for individual expertise and creative thought would seem to be at least slightly exaggerated. For example, the Symbolist project was, by Selz's own account, a group achievement (though not committee, it is true). Three outsiders were engaged to choose the art and write the catalogue essays for an important exhibition, one that the staff curator, Peter Selz, refers to as
his
show. This notion of idea over execution puts Selz ahead of himself into the realm of Conceptualism, an art phenomenon that he has partly resisted. In fact, Peter appears to have a broad understanding of what qualifies as ownership of projects that require the high-level expertise of others to bring to successful fruition.

Finally, the powerful presence of the MoMA trustees, including members of the Rockefeller family, must have presented a challenge in museum decisions and operation, even if the Modern's board was as enlightened as Peter describes. MoMA was not exempt from some board interference, though with d'Harnoncourt as mediator this may have been less of a problem then than it is today. In museums as elsewhere, those who pay the bills and underwrite grand new facilities—or raise the money to do so—want to have a say in how things are run. It appears that d'Harnoncourt did a remarkably good job dealing with this conundrum. Indeed, that ability, along with fundraising skills, became the main qualification for success as a museum director. Curators such as Peter Selz were thereby supportively insulated, which allowed them to happily devote their energies to thinking up and producing provocative, enlightening, and educational new art exhibitions. This turned out to be Selz's strength as well as his pleasure.

Peter had a fundamentally positive view of MoMA's board. He felt that the curatorial staff—in his mind, the key people in terms of creating the collections and exhibitions—was for the most part respected and left alone by both administration and the trustees. However, one anecdote about Nelson Rockefeller tells another side of this story:

 

Rockefeller was very smart. First of all, they never called the museum the Rockefeller Museum—like the Guggenheim and the Whitney.
That was the first thing they did that was smart. . . . And they did an absolute minimum of interference. Occasionally there was some, as in the last show . . . that [Edward] Steichen did. It was the Farm Security Administration photographs—a marvelous show. It was the biggest show after
The Family of Man
[1955]. I remember when I saw the show installed in the afternoon . . . as you walked in there was this frontis-piece, not actually a Farm Security Administration photograph, [but] a portrait of FDR. That evening at the opening I saw this big portrait gone. This was precisely when Nelson was running for governor [of New York] on the Republican ticket, so he did not want the portrait of FDR staring people in the face as they walked into the museum. He said he removed it, or “suggested” that it be removed, because it didn't belong; it wasn't a Farm Security photograph. But that was really one of the few instances I remember when there was a bit of interference. Most of the time . . . politics did not get in.
²³

Elsewhere, however, Peter supplies two other examples that suggest the influence of political or market-driven forces on exhibitions, and gives the impression that this regrettable tendency to step outside the institutional mandate became more pronounced as time went on. These “lapses,” he explained, violated the rule of maintaining a fine-art high ground. As he saw things, the responsibility of the museum was to preserve and explain the cultural artifacts (paintings and sculpture being Peter's department) representing the creative highlights of art, beginning with recent European art but increasingly including American modernist art. As the balance shifted, however, politics and commerce inevitably shouldered their way in. Peter described the situation thus:

 

There was another thing that was going on, which I can only look at now with [benefit of] hindsight. Abstract Expressionism was shown internationally all the time, in embassies, and then there was the big
New American Painting
show [1959] that Barr was in charge of, and that was when I came. The idea behind it, as Barr wrote in the catalogue, was the freedom of the American artist. That was against, you know, the restriction of the avantgarde behind the Iron Curtain. And that [claim] was going on all the time—and the Abstract Expressionists were quite upset. They were very ambivalent about it. They couldn't understand how their work, which was such a private matter for them, would be catapulted into an international thing. They liked it and they didn't like
it. I think their response was pretty negative in the long run, because they didn't know how to deal with all the success—it was such a different world. . . . Most of them ended in some kind of despair . . . they didn't know how to deal with sudden acclaim.
²⁴

Peter allowed that Barr—perhaps not fully conscious of the fact— was using the art politically, possibly as a weapon in the cold war. Nevertheless, Peter insisted, Barr's interpretation of the art, even within this international context, was sincere, not forced on the museum by powerful members of the board (or, presumably, Washington propaganda agencies). Still, the Abstract Expressionist artists probably never saw themselves as players in a political arena. And they surely would have been shocked to learn of the cultured André Malraux's purported attempts to politicize contemporary art along nationalistic lines by sabotaging the 1962 Rothko exhibition in Paris and attacking the American show at the 1964 Venice Biennale while pressuring the jury to award France top prize.
²⁵
In the end, Robert Rauschenberg took first prize at the Biennale, and Alan Solomon, the American commissioner, declared chauvinistically that this single event marked, in Peter's words, the “demise of the School of Paris and the triumph of American painting.”
²⁶

According to Selz, everything changed that year—1964—when the “dealers took over,” enabled by a last-minute juror vacancy at the Venice Biennale. As Peter recalls, the word went out that Leo Castelli, Rauschenberg's dealer, would pay the expenses for any prominent curator who would fill the position—and, of course, vote for Rauschenberg. Three were invited from the Modern: Peter, Bill Seitz, and Dorothy Miller. All of them declined. The inherent conflict of interest was obvious.
²⁷

That was the mid-1960s, and the art world had moved its headquarters to New York, a migration fully in the interests of the American art market. Peter's view is that this historic shift was largely the doing of art dealers: “There were all kinds of distortions going on, like . . . I remember press releases claiming this was the first time that an American [Rauschenberg] had won the first prize in Venice, which was important to people at the time. But it wasn't true at all; Mark Tobey had gotten it a few years earlier. But Tobey was not a New York painter, so that was
hushed up and nobody paid attention. He was not part of ‘the group,' and nobody could make money on Tobey anyway.”
²⁸

In addition to the political ramifications of this newly achieved stature of American painting—as evidence of the cultural and economic benefits provided by capitalist democracy—Peter describes the “snobbism” of New York cultural centrism, aided and abetted by the growing art market in Manhattan. Even then, in the mid-1960s, he recognized the exclusivity that accompanied creative success as fueled by a powerful and motivated art market. Here is how Selz, whose own museum participated in what he was criticizing, describes the situation:

 

Anything that wasn't happening in New York was totally neglected with an extremely nationalistic, chauvinistic attitude which I was always fighting. I'll give you a couple of examples. They were saying this kind of abstract art could only happen in a free country; then I found out, in the late fifties, that there was some very exciting—maybe not the greatest in the world, but some very, very good—abstract painting being done in Poland. And I went to Poland and eventually organized a show of Polish art called
Fifteen Polish Painters
[1961]. It was my purpose to show two things. One, that good art—in this case Tachiste rather than Abstract Expressionism, because it was more oriented towards Paris than it was towards New York—was going on in Europe. And, second, it was not only going on in Western Europe but in a Socialist country.

The whole idea in New York was that anything going on outside America was not worthwhile . . . that Miró was the last important European artist. I remember one time when Bob Motherwell had a show in Paris and he came back furious. He said, “I will never show in Paris again. Here I had that show and the French artists didn't come to see it.” So I said, “Bob, how many shows of younger French artists have you gone to see?” And he said, “There aren't any.” That was very much the attitude—a very insular kind of attitude.
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You might say that New York centrism in the early 1960s and for several decades following was one of Peter's pet peeves. He simply found it self-serving and, from the standpoint of the dealers, commercially opportunistic. Yet at the time, his was not a majority view. There was, in fact, every reason for the art and culture establishment to embrace New
York exceptionalism. Superiority to and independence from contemporaneous European modernism came along with—indeed, defined—the Triumph of American Painting myth that attached itself to the 1950s New York School painters and their successors.
³⁰
When America appeared to take the art mantle from France, it really was exclusively New York and Abstract Expressionism that accomplished the historic coup. Peter, as a major curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was fully aware that New York had become a center for significant modernist art. However, he was too well traveled and too open to different creative expression, wherever it emerged, to restrict himself to Manhattan and environs in his ongoing search for new art and artists.

Selz's early appreciation of Peter Voulkos is an important example, illustrating the frustrations that accompanied his forays outside the defined center. Peter arranged a small show of Voulkos's irreverent Abstract Expressionist ceramics, which he'd created in the pot shop at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Held in MoMA's Penthouse Gallery in 1960, the show did not create much of a stir. In fact, according to the curator, it was virtually ignored. Although Voulkos's transgressive use of media, his “unnatural hybrid” forcing Abstract Expressionist painting and clay sculpture to share the same formerly utilitarian object, soon came to be recognized as a major breakthrough, he was in the end a Californian showing in New York City. When asked if Voulkos would have attracted more attention had he been a “local” artist, Peter's unhesitating response was, “No doubt.” As he put it, the attitude was that Voulkos “hadn't been around. . . . He hadn't paid his dues; he was not part of the in-group. It was very much an in-group kind of thing, and it was something I could never accept. . . . Much earlier on I was working on the German Expressionists as against Paris, and I never doubted for one minute that what was going on in Paris between the wars and what was going on in New York after the war was of primary importance. But it also seemed to me that other things were important as well.”
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This parochialism bothered Selz, and the fact that it did, and that he acted accordingly, seeking artists from outside those narrow confines, put him from the beginning on the edge, if not outside the mainstream as represented by his own museum.

Another,
even more dramatic, example of New York parochialism, according to Selz, was the response of many critics to his 1959
New Images of Man
exhibition, his first after arriving at MoMA. In some ways that exhibition represented Peter's throwing down of the gauntlet. He absolutely insisted on not just stylistic but also geographic latitude as he set about defining the modernist creative universe. Having spent three years at Pomona, he had discovered artists in California whom he believed worthy of broader recognition.