Peter Selz (13 page)

De Kooning's immigration story was not that of Selz, but there were similarities in their almost effortless assimilation through attraction to the fast pace and excitement of their new home. Neither spoke English well when they arrived, and to a certain degree both were loners, although Selz managed to remedy that situation fairly quickly by immersing himself in the social world of art galleries. And both successfully reinvented themselves (Selz several times) in response to the very different American environment. But perhaps most important, they both witnessed and later participated in—one as an artist, the other as an art historian—the transformation of American art from a parochial reflection of European models to the so-called triumph of the New York School. As American critics in the 1950s celebrated the shift in the balance of power from Paris to New York, de Kooning was a leading figure among those artists, mostly immigrants, whose work fueled that shift.

At the same time, art history was continuing to establish itself as a legitimate field at the leading universities in the country. Selz was a contributor to the eventual Americanization of art-historical writing and publishing. Above all, both men were either at or close to the center of the rise of modernist art in the United States, the most modern nation in the world. And the Museum of Modern Art provided the setting for the paths of these two immigrants to converge.

Among Selz's contributions to an evolving understanding of modernism was his ability to think of it in both nonobjective and representational terms. His specialty was German Expressionism, and he continued
to view art through an expressionist lens. De Kooning's brand of Abstract Expressionism, in which the figure appeared and disappeared, showed a dedication to the best art of the past as well as contemporary stylistic discoveries; in this, it provided an ideal locus for Selz's expressionist-inspired ideas about modernist art. The artist's violent women paintings of the early 1950s offer perhaps the best visual equivalents to Selz's thinking about a new figuration, particularly as presented in his controversial
New Images of Man
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. De Kooning was represented in this groundbreaking exhibition by six works, more than any other artist except Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, two other Selz favorites.

Selz recalls the regrettable cancellation of the de Kooning show as due to reluctance on the part of the artist:

 

I would go to his [de Kooning's] studio and admire his work. And then Bill [Seitz] and I decided to give him a retrospective. He withdrew for many reasons, including one involving Mark Rothko. Mark and I had taken the train down to Washington, D.C., to see a big Franz Kline retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. There was a sign saying that this was a memorial exhibition because Kline had just died. Well, de Kooning was there, and Mark said to Bill, “I hear the next show at MoMA is your memorial,” having just looked at the announcement of Kline's death. I don't know if that was a Freudian slip. And then he of course said, “I mean retrospective.”
⁴⁴

Rothko's slip of the tongue may have put de Kooning off on the idea of the exhibition, but another reason for his change of mind, according to Selz, lay squarely on Seitz's shoulders. In Peter's words, his curator “really screwed up.” Seitz knew a great deal about Abstract Expressionism, “far more than anyone else.” But at that particular time he seemed to be more interested in the conceptualist Marcel Duchamp than in the painter de Kooning. Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with the subject of their show:

 

He [Seitz] would go down to Bill's [de Kooning's] studio to supposedly work on the show, but he talked about Duchamp—he asked Bill what he thought of Duchamp. And Bill asked me that at an opening one time, “Why is this guy talking about Duchamp all the time?” Bill Seitz was
involved with Duchamp at that point, [trying to understand] him. And the other stuff, Abstract Expressionist painting, he [already] knew. . . . Well, what [de Kooning] meant was, “I'm not interested in Marcel Duchamp.” He thought as little of him as he thought of the Abstract Expressionist artists. There was a big, big division between the mind and the paint project.
⁴⁵

When Peter was asked which side he would come down on if he had to choose between the intellect and the feelings, “the mind” and “the paint,” he not surprisingly returned to his roots in German Expressionism and the emphasis on personal subjectivity: “I was never as impressed with Duchamp as many of my friends were. I found him an extremely interesting phenomenon, but I've never seen a work that moves me. But when looking at a de Kooning painting, my heart palpitates.”
⁴⁶

Throughout his career, when it comes to matters of art, Selz has been guided by intuition, instinct, and emotion. He
feels
his decisions about art and is guided by those feelings at least as much as by the mind. Certainly no one could accuse Peter Selz of following the cerebral dictates of theory, like many of his colleagues and almost an entire generation of their students did. So it is sadly ironic that the debate between these two approaches, as perceived by de Kooning in any case, contributed to the cancellation of an exhibition that would have been a fitting expression of Selz's thinking about modernist art, in which de Kooning occupied an iconic position.

FROM
NEW IMAGES OF MAN
TO ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

When
asked to identify his most important exhibitions at MoMA, Peter Selz selected six:
New Images of Man, Mark Rothko
, Jean Tinguely's
Homage to New York, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, Max Beckmann
, and
Alberto Giacometti
.
¹
In each case they represent a different and revealing aspect of his thinking about modernist art.

Before he left Pomona for New York, Peter was asked by director René d'Harnoncourt to propose three shows he would like to mount as curator of modern painting and sculpture exhibitions. His list represented interests he had nurtured since the Chicago days and that still inform his perspective on what constitutes modern art. It was also noncanonical; that is, it challenged or enlarged upon the Museum of Modern Art's take on modernist art as established by Alfred Barr. The three exhibitions he proposed, all of which were realized during Selz's tenure at the
Modern, were
New Images of Man, Art Nouveau
, and
The Art of Assemblage
. Peter believes that his list clinched his getting the job at MoMA. And the implication is that Barr, to the extent that he was still involved in guiding the exhibition program, and d'Harnoncourt were in fact more open to fresh thinking about modern art than the then-accepted Barr canon might indicate. Selz's proposals, however, do raise a couple of questions: Why did Selz choose these relatively unexamined topics to present at the world's most prominent showcase for important modernist art? And what do these choices tell us about his personal understanding of modernism? The answers appear fairly readily throughout the interviews, in his descriptions of what distinguished each exhibition.

In fact, perhaps more than any other aspect of his career, Peter loves to talk about his exhibitions:

 

I felt that the
New Images
and
Assemblage
shows dealing with contemporary work, which had somewhat been neglected, and an historic survey of Art Nouveau, which had been totally neglected, was a pretty good balance. What I was trying to do with
New Images
—put together in 1958 and shown in 1959—was to present something I'm still very much interested in, a newly emergent figuration after Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. . . . I was very much involved with this kind of art, and in the catalogue of the show I was drawing parallels between the new figuration and existentialism. Paul Tillich wrote a preface to the catalogue, and I see it now as a pretty important document for some of the artists' thinking at the time. I was really concerned at that point with an artist's response to the world situation, let's say the world after Buchenwald, Hiroshima, and World War II—the existentialist attitude.
²

One may well wonder why Peter, an avowed atheist, would choose a famous Christian theologian like Paul Tillich to introduce what Peter viewed as an exhibition of secular humanist images.
³
When asked about this, Peter paused for a moment before his response. The first thing he mentioned was that Tillich was also from Germany and came to America, at the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr, at about the same time he did (the Tillichs arrived in 1933). Also, Tillich took a great interest in and wrote about art, including essays on Matthias Grünewald and Picasso's
Guernica
. He was interested in the Christian aspect of German Expressionism,
especially Peter's favorite, Max Beckmann. In short, Tillich was a highly respected intellectual who advocated the kind of art, generally figurative, that made up the
New Images of Man
.

Peter called Tillich at home in New York and invited him to write about the show from an existentialist perspective. Tillich agreed, and there began a long personal and professional association. Peter recalls a dinner with the Tillichs and the Filipino American artist Alfonso Ossorio at the Selzes' rented summer house on Long Island. Ossorio, a devout Roman Catholic, is noted for the Christian iconography that persisted even as his work became more abstract under the influence of his Long Island neighbor Jackson Pollock, whom Peter greatly admired. The fact that Ossorio sought out Dubuffet in France only reinforced a camaraderie of taste and interest. This community of aesthetic humanist artists and thinkers doubtless provided support for Peter's basic nonformalist approach at MoMA. And the religious component—perhaps better described as subjective, emotional, and mystical—played a part in that broader artistic vision.

At any rate, the prefatory note in the
New Images
catalogue, with its eloquent positioning of art within the larger context of the human condition, leaves no doubt as to why Peter Selz chose Paul Tillich. And since it states so completely Peter's own view, it is worth quoting here:

 

Each period has its peculiar image of man. It appears in its poems and novels, music, philosophy, plays and dances; and it appears in its painting and sculpture. Whenever a new period is conceived in the womb of the preceding period, a new image of man pushes towards the surface and finally breaks through to find its artists and philosophers. We have been living for decades at a turning point, and nothing is more indicative of this fact than the revolutionary styles in the visual arts which have followed each other since the beginning of our century. Each of these styles transformed the image of man drastically, even when compared to the changes of the past five centuries. Where are the organic forms of man's body, the human character of his face, the uniqueness of his individual person? And finally, when in abstract or NonObjective painting and sculpture, the figure disappears completely, one is tempted to ask, what has happened to man? This is the question which we direct at our contemporary artists, and in this question one can discern an undertone of embarrassment, of anger and even of hostility
against them. Instead, we should ask ourselves, what has become of
us?
What has happened to the reality of our lives? If we listen to the more profound observers of our period, we hear them speak of the danger in which modern man lives: the danger of losing his humanity and becoming a thing among the things he produces.
⁴

The hostility, even ridicule, that
New Images of Man
aroused in several critics and even other artists took Selz by surprise.
⁵
The writer of a long
Art News
review—evidently hostile to formulaic latter-day Abstract Expressionism—entirely missed the point, setting up abstraction and figuration as irreconcilably antithetical, either/or stylistic phenomena, the opposite of Selz's inclusive and flexible modernist view. The New York provincialism to which he so vigorously objected is also evident in the reviewer's condescending regional put-downs: “‘New Images' has a moderately entertaining effect, thanks to the talent scout mentality which has filled the center of the show with blooming starlets from far-away stops on the Golden State Limited. The most stunningly slick painting is oozed onto canvas by Nathan Oliveira [illustrated:
Seated Man with Object
, 1957], a fast shuffle artist whose . . . spatial adventuring . . . and great attention to the small, fractional movements in the rugged outcoasts of forms have long been clichés in San Francisco abstraction.”
⁶
And so on. In general, this particular critic, Manny Farber, treated the Europeans better than the Californians (with his backhanded reference to “stops on the Golden State Limited”) and Chicagoans such as Peter's friend Leon Golub.
⁷
It is no small irony that Farber ultimately spent a big chunk of his distinguished career as an admired film critic and painter in California.

In reading other prominent critics, it appears that Peter may have exaggerated the proportion of negativity. For the few scathing reviews, more display a willingness to look closely and provide intellectual (if not always aesthetic) justifications for images that were frequently described as unsettling and disturbing. The view of “man” as presented in the exhibition was not seen as a positive one, but it was generally taken seriously. For example, even conservative John Canaday in the
New York Times
offered what might be called qualified praise—stingy, but hardly the negative response his conservative reputation would lead one to
expect: “In spite of questions of selection, this is an important exhibition. As it sets out to do, it demonstrates that the cultivation of expressive imagery by artists who have seemed isolated from one another has been a pervasive constant in contemporary painting and sculpture. If it means to say further, by implication, that this constant is the white hope of art at the moment—then Hear! Hear!”
⁸