Peter Selz (14 page)

Greater insight and understanding of the deeper implications of the show's theme were brought to the subject by two distinguished critics, Aline B. Saarinen, also writing in the
New York Times
, and Katherine Kuh, newly appointed art critic for
Saturday Review
. Saarinen's article was especially attentive to and descriptive of what she viewed as the horrific quality of much of the imagery—“human figures with bodies distorted, misshapen, mutilated, flesh decayed and corrupt, corroded or charred”—to which she devoted an entire paragraph:

 

Is this some freak show of horrors inspired by a sadistic impulse on the part of Peter Selz, the director of the exhibition? Is this mere Grand Guignol? Has the exhibition been put on by the Museum of Modern Art with no more significant intention than that of a movie theatre displaying a “chiller” in order to boost attendance? Unquestionably, some of the public will answer these questions with impassioned affirmatives. But others will recognize that this exhibition is concerned with the human predicament, with the troubled states of the soul in our time. They will understand that it is disquieting and unsettling precisely because it ruthlessly invades our inner privacy and inexorably lays bare modern man's fears and anxieties, his bestiality and his loneliness.
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Earlier in her piece, Saarinen states that the main issues in the “debate” she anticipates will be provoked by the show are not aesthetic but rather center on the questions of “premise and justification.” And she also recognizes the implied confrontation between expressive figuration and Abstract Expressionism (something that Selz in his catalogue introduction denied was intended),
¹⁰
cautioning that the yearning of “New Humanists” for “a return to the ideal or naturalist figure” will find cold comfort here. “Such dreamers had best remain with abstract expressionism, which they can smugly and comfortably misunderstand as mere decoration.”
¹¹
In this observation Saarinen seems entirely in
step with Selz and his stated disinterest in challenging anything but the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. Both critic and curator seem to share the opinion that the recognizable human presence was desirable, perhaps essential, to make certain important points about the condition of contemporary men and women.

Katherine Kuh was thoughtfully critical of the exhibition, pointing out where the claims of the exhibition were not always evident from the work on view. She rightly cited German Expressionism as a major source and pointed out that “despite their arresting vigor, these artists as yet have not produced a language appreciably different from their predecessors'.” Recognizing the source of “disturbing images of man in Grünewald, Bosch, and Goya,” Kuh acknowledged that these great painters differed from modern-day artists in that they were “less concerned with the merging of form and content”:

 

This unique contribution of the twentieth century is particularly well demonstrated in the current exhibition, where artists depend on appropriately pitted surfaces, discarded materialism and gashed pigment to describe the decay and destruction. This very union of meaning and means may well prove to be the new realism of our time. . . . There are those who will be shocked by the brutality of the exhibition, but for me it remains curiously romantic and moral: romantic in its zeal for personal expression, moral in its concentration on the evils of our time. Anger here is so strong as to become an ethical judgment.
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How could one wish for a better appreciation of curatorial intent? It is puzzling, not to mention out of character, that Selz selectively remembers only the negative response to his first great exhibition. Both of these reviews, especially Katherine Kuh's, grasp in one way or another just what Selz was after. And they provide an entry into an exhibition that was, certainly in retrospect, as morally honest as anything else of its time. Figuration versus abstraction was not the issue. It was a moral and ethical need that brought the show together.

Remarkably, the critical controversy surrounding the show and its reception, compounded by limited understanding of Selz's goals, endures to the present day. Peter recently felt compelled to take to task critic Peter Schjeldahl for his characterization of
New Images
in a
New
Yorker
review of Leon Golub's late drawings.
¹³
In a letter to Schjeldahl, he wrote: “It is dead wrong to call the exhibition at MoMA a ‘flop.' As I understand it, ‘flop' refers to minute attendance and I wonder if you checked the attendance records. To my recollection, it brought a very large number of visitors to 53rd Street, partly because of the controversy which it aroused.” Selz went on: “Alfred Barr congratulated me on this, my first exhibition at MoMA, saying that controversial exhibitions and acquisitions were the lifeblood of the Museum.” The irate Peter Selz concluded his letter with an observation that goes back to the contemporary worldview that the art seemed to reflect: “It is totally absurd to write that ‘only Golub of the young artists survived without despair.' What the hell does that mean? Among the younger artists were Karel Appel, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Eduardo Paolozzi, H. C. Westermann, as well as Leon Golub. It seems clear, Mr. Schjeldahl, that they managed to survive without despair.”
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The second show with which Peter was closely associated after joining the MoMA staff, Jean Tinguely's
Homage to New York
, attracted as much attention as did
New Images of Man
. Peter was stepping into dangerous water when he decided to pursue this event. Tinguely had visited New York for the first time in January 1960. According to one account, on the flight he sketched ideas for a work that would express his feelings about the idea of New York: “I thought how nice it would be to make a little machine there that would be conceived, like Chinese fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom.” It would be a machine called “
Homage to New York
, and its sole
raison d'être
would be to destroy itself in one act of glorious mechanical freedom. . . . He decided at once that the only proper locale for the event was the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and as soon as he landed he set about achieving this almost impossible objective.”
¹⁵
Even with only partial information, collections curator Dorothy Miller had been suspicious of what Tinguely planned and had turned down his proposal. As Selz recalled, “Dorothy Miller said, ‘No, our job at the museum is to preserve, not destroy, works of art.' So then Dore [Ashton] talked to me; Tinguely talked to me. Tinguely said it was fine [what Miller said], but that applies to acquisitions. And this was an exhibition, not an acquisition.”
¹⁶

Although
Peter assigned Miller, the first woman to occupy a responsible curatorial position at MoMA, exclusively to the collections side of museum operations, she had been involved for years (hired in 1934) as Barr's main associate in planning exhibitions. Since 1941 she had been in charge of a series devoted to introducing young artists supposedly associated with new trends. Among these shows, two were of particular note:
Twelve Americans
(1952) and
Sixteen Americans
(1959), the latter on view the year of Peter's
New Images
. But rather than representing the leading edge of art trends, according to intellectual historian Richard Cándida Smith, “neither Miller nor the Museum of Modern Art had been at the forefront of exhibiting new developments in the visual arts.”
¹⁷
For example,
Sixteen Americans
gave the museum's blessing to Abstract Expressionism at a time when it was already being discussed in the past tense. And in 1936, Miller's
New Horizons in American Art
included a large sampling of Works Progress Administration (WPA) art, much of it of indifferent quality—especially when compared to French painting, as even her boss, Alfred Barr, noted with exasperation.
¹⁸

Peter, new on the job but committed to modernist innovation, was willing to take a chance on Tinguely, whose work he admired. In this, he was encouraged by his friend Dore Ashton and by the former Berlin Dadaist-turned-psychiatrist Richard Huelsenbeck. Peter understood that the destruction was the point, and he took the request to d'Harnoncourt, who approved the project. According to Selz, René believed MoMA
should
take chances. Peter further remembers Tinguely's reasoning behind his self-destructing sculpture: “Tinguely told me, ‘No matter how you try to conserve and preserve, it will be gone anyhow. It's just a matter of time.' His whole idea was that art like life is in flux, and he emphasized that flux. Simply put, destroy the structure of art and the [inevitable] process is quicker. Tinguely [also] wanted the white-painted junk sculpture to be beautiful, so people would be dismayed. I had no idea how beautiful it would be.”
¹⁹

The idea and preparation of the piece, and above all the key feature of artist-planned destruction, were kept secret. Even Peter and the MoMA staff did not know just how transgressive of traditional museum values the sculpture would prove to be. In an extensive 1982 interview, he
described the project, the creation of the piece, and the initial shocked reaction:

 

We [had] just had a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome exhibition . . . so in that gigantic dome, over a period of three weeks, Tinguely assembled an enormous machine, with hundreds of wheels. Going out to junkyards—in Europe he had never seen junkyards like we have in America—in New Jersey. He loved all that stuff, and assembled and built it with the thing becoming bigger and bigger. Everything from a little baby carriage to a bathtub; even the upright piano which finally burned down. The event took place in the [early spring] of 1960 in the museum garden, in front of a number of invited spectators.

But there it was, burning up, and this was exactly the wrong time because the museum had had this terrible fire about three months before I arrived. . . . I had heard about the fire, which burned a Monet diptych, but I wasn't there. So they were much more aware of fire, and then all of a sudden there was a flame in the museum garden. The museum had just engaged in a $25 million fundraising campaign, most of the money [being] allocated for acquisitions—and here I was destroying a work of art!
²⁰

The frisson of anticipation among the 250 invited spectators as they waited to see the much-heralded performance was compromised by a long wait standing in cold slush and the unruly behavior of the work of art itself. The immediate response to the Tinguely installation, however, was shocked disapproval. Peter and Thalia were, according to his account, shunned at the reception following the “assisted suicide” in the garden: “My wife and I went to the reception given by George Staempfli. At that time Tinguely had a show at Staempfli Gallery. We were just avoided; nobody at the reception talked to me. Including d'Harnoncourt and Barr. On the way home we agreed that maybe my days at MoMA were numbered.”
²¹

However, among the guests was critic John Canaday, whose review appeared in the following day's
New York Times
. The initial “outrage” was followed almost immediately, as Selz put it, by appreciation. Canaday's review focused on the failure of the piece to properly self-destruct, but he recognized the importance of the underlying concept: “The significance of the event lies not in the fact that it was, overall, a fiasco, but in
the intention of Mr. Tinguely and the Museum of Modern Art in staging it in the first place. In conceiving what must seem to most people a preposterous and wasteful stunt, Mr. Tinguely was, rather, a kind of philosopher . . . the leading one of a current generation of artists descended from the Dadaists.” And his observation that “Tinguely makes fools of machines, while the rest of mankind supinely permits machines to make fools of them,” is a small gem of critical irony.
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The event added quickly to Selz's curatorial reputation for daring and innovative exhibitions: “My colleagues at the museum were dubious about this kind of thing. But they also liked the fact that here was somebody who came to the museum with new ideas, who was doing new things, and as time went by my position was pretty well cemented.”
²³
Judging from this description, he enjoyed playing the “bad” boy, the creative provocateur, at MoMA—an idea that is reinforced in a 2008 video interview Peter did for a British documentary on
Homage to New York
produced by artist Michael Landy. Tinguely's short-lived work appears to represent to this day some of the key notions of conceptualism, kineticism, performance, assemblage, and—above all—the nonessential nature of the physical artifact. The art in this case was Tinguely's
idea
, not the elaborately complicated object itself, which in fact was sacrificed to the idea. Peter Selz, more than many of his colleagues at MoMA, grasped that concept, which in turn became a main theme of the art of the late twentieth century.

The Tinguely experiment was important for Peter in that it further developed his interest in and thinking about art that moves and the idea that movement and change actually define modernity. The single-sheet flyer for the event (now a collector's item) consists of a drawing by Tinguely, seemingly a fanciful “blueprint” for his machine; statements by Selz, Barr, K. G. (Pontus) Hultén, Ashton, and Huelsenbeck; and a handwritten punning poem in French by Marcel Duchamp, certainly the most direct influence on Tinguely's “suisssscide métallique.”

A few lines from K. G. Hultén's statement in the flyer suggest that Peter was participating in some of the more advanced art thinking of the time, at least in museums. “Tinguely's machines are . . . anti-machines. They make anarchy. They represent a freedom that without them would
not exist. They are pieces of life that have jumped out of the systems: out of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. To try to conserve the situation that exists will make a man unhappy, because it is hopeless. This kind of art accepts changes, destruction, construction and chance. These machines are pure rhythm, jazz-machines
.”
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