Peter Selz (15 page)

Selz seemed to relish his “embattled” position, viewing the controversy surrounding his shows as a sure sign of their success. He was open to exploring movements that had gone out of fashion, such as Art Nouveau, or individual artists, such as Dubuffet, who had not gained acclaim in the United States. From contemporary accounts and reviews it would appear that this approach generally kept things fresh and provocative—though in the case of
Art Nouveau
, the direction was more toward nostalgia.

Art Nouveau, in Peter's view, had been totally neglected. His personal attraction to the style lay in the ways it had influenced modernist art, as he explained in the catalogue: “Scholarly investigations on Art Nouveau began to be published in the 1930s, but it was not until 1952 that the first all-inclusive exhibition of the movement was organized by the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich. The recent turnabout in the evaluation of Art Nouveau calls for renewed interpretation and, above all, a definition of this elusive style . . . in which a specific creative force broke with the historicism of the past to prepare the ground for the art of this century.”
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Peter is convinced that this exhibition, which opened in the summer of 1960, introduced Art Nouveau to an American audience and ignited the stylistic movement that came to dominate graphic and fashion design for much of that decade. The omnipresent Peter Max ashtrays and the stylized flowing lines of album covers and rock poster art testified to Art Nouveau's impact on visual youth culture of the time. And almost every young couple decorating their first “pad” aspired to a Tiffany lamp, inevitably settling for one of the hundreds of copies, most of indifferent if not dreadful craftsmanship. Selz provides an amusing anecdote about the exhibition and changing tastes: “A man who sounded like a little old lady on the telephone said: ‘Mr. Selz, you did a terrible thing.' ‘So what did I do?' And he said, ‘Well, I inherited this large quantity of Tiffany
glass from my family, and with the Museum of Modern Art doing nothing but good design, the Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe kind of design, I sold it all for a song. And now that you bring it [Art Nouveau] back, I have nothing left!'”
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Selz also recalls more important things about the show, not the least of which was that he was told it was the first time since the museum's opening that every department had worked together.

 

Architecture, painting and sculpture, photography, and design departments, we all worked together. I was in overall charge, but we presented the exhibition together. And Drexler installed it beautifully. It was a very exciting thing because it was the first time that people reexamined Art Nouveau, not only as an important international movement, but [as] something historically important. . . . We put together a book rather than [the usual] catalogue, with four contributors on different aspects. I wrote the painting and sculpture section, Alan Fern did the graphics, Greta Daniel did three-dimensional design, and Henry Russell Hitchcock, architecture. . . . Now the literature is so enormous, but this was the first thing published in English as a reexamination of Art Nouveau.
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Peter had a firm grasp on the significance of his exhibition. Beyond the virtue of providing the opportunity for people to look at utilitarian objects in a new way and recognize the shared design that makes them documents of creativity at a certain time, his complementary emphasis on painting and sculpture illuminated the stylistic design component. He was interested in pointing out the relationships between different categories of forms. In this respect, he was drawn to the international Symbolist movement and the unity of the arts: “Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Klimt—and my theory was that, with exceptions like Cézanne, let us say, or Renoir, most artists working at the turn of the [twentieth] century, especially the younger generation, were much involved in Art Nouveau or helped create it, as in the cases of Lautrec and Gauguin. . . . In the catalogue I start out with Debussy, [who was part of] a Symbolist unity that prevailed for about ten years.”
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Citing Gauguin's decorative flatness, use of outlines, and arbitrary color (as in his studio door panel of 1899), Selz sees that artist's design
work of the period—including decorative plates and bucolic scenes on vases—as closely related to the spirit of Art Nouveau. Gauguin's affirmation of two-dimensionality is one aspect of his influence on other key artists associated with the movement: “Bonnard, in his activities as a painter, sculptor, book illustrator, lithographer, and designer of decorative screens and posters, is perhaps typical of the all-embracing attitude towards the arts of this period.”
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Selz further points out the obvious influence of Japanese decoration, which permeated the style.

Selz the art historian was always careful to look for the present in the past. He also appreciated patterns, recognizing that the course of history was meandering and even circular, with old ideas and styles being repeated and altered in a way that continued to unify the arts over time. In
Art Nouveau
, Selz reified that thinking. For him, modernism did not represent an absolute break with the past, and he explicitly underlined the connection between past and present in the
Art Nouveau
catalogue: “Art Nouveau claimed to be the new art of the new time. Yet its avowed break with tradition was never complete. In certain ways Art Nouveau actually belongs with the nineteenth-century historical styles. The century had earlier run the gamut from the Egyptian revival of the first Empire to the baroque revival of the second.”
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At the same time, Selz concluded, with emphasis, that “historically Art Nouveau fulfilled the liberating function of an ‘anti' movement. It discarded the old, outworn conventions and set the stage for the developments which followed with such extraordinary rapidity in the twentieth century.”
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Selz was not the first to recognize Art Nouveau as an influential precursor of twentieth-century modernism. Some of the most insightful writing on the connections between primitivism (which Selz honors in his essay), Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the fundamentals of modernism had appeared two decades earlier. In his classic study
Primitivism in Modern Art
(1938), Robert J. Goldwater provided a subtle and enlightening interpretation of the workings of artistic influence and appropriation, one that later was further articulated by Meyer Schapiro: “The accomplishment of the past ceases to be a closed tradition of noble content or absolute perfection, but a model of individuality, of history-making effort through continual self-transformation.”
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Although
Selz, who considers both Goldwater and Schapiro as mentors and models, was not the first to present these central ideas, he had one thing they did not: the public forum of the world's leading museum of modern art. The popular visibility of the MoMA exhibition may not have initiated the 1960s vogue for Art Nouveau, but it could not avoid being a contributing factor.

•    •    •

Peter's access to modern art has always been through the individual artists themselves. Among his many artist friends, Mark Rothko occupied a special position. Along with the nonobjective paintings of Sam Francis, Rothko's lyrical color-resonant (not, in Peter's view, color-field) paintings represented for Selz a high point in modernist abstraction. It should be kept in mind that Selz was particularly devoted to expressionist figuration, as opposed to exclusively formalist approaches. Nonetheless, Rothko is a reminder that Peter understood and appreciated abstraction as
important
, perhaps even central, in how we view both the physical aspect of nature and the spiritual longing of human beings. In any event, for Peter modernism was never a matter simply of styles or surface manipulation of form and color.

Mark Rothko
was Selz's first one-person show at MoMA, opening in January 1961. The Tinguely installation had preceded it by several months, but that show was really inserted into the schedule and did not involve the preparation that
Rothko
required. Peter talks about the exhibition in glowing terms:

 

It was the most beautiful show I've ever done. Even today, when I think back, it was absolutely magnificent. Just as with
Art Nouveau
, all the departments worked together—I broke the rules there. The museum had the idea that if you show an artist's work, the curator makes all the decisions and the artist should not take part. I broke with that also by inviting Rothko to take part . . . by deciding what should go in the show, and how the show was to be hung and lit. Now this is done a lot. But that was the first time [at MoMA], and my colleagues protested, [but] I said, “I'm going to do it this way.” . . . The two best Rothko collections
at that point were at the Phillips in Washington and at Count Panza's in Italy [part of that collection went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles]. We borrowed heavily from those two. We divided the space into small rooms, so that the viewer would be very close to the pictures. And the lighting was fairly low. Mark wanted to hang them right down to the floor—but they would have been ruined when the floors were cleaned. But we hung them as low as possible.
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The slim catalogue (only thirty-six printed pages) belies the significance of this exhibition, which amounted to public recognition by the leading museum of modern art of one of the most important contemporary American painters of the time. In choosing Rothko as the subject of his first solo show, Peter made a statement that his view of modernism extended beyond the figurative focus of
New Images of Man
. However, it bears noting that what he was looking for in that first show, a humanistic—even a spiritual—strain that continued to inform modernism despite the formalist character of much contemporary art, he also found in Rothko. There was no inconsistency in these choices.

The reviews of
Rothko
were numerous and frequently appreciative, if not exactly enthusiastic. In truth, what praise there was seems to have been grudgingly offered. This lukewarm reception must have been disappointing for both Selz and the artist. What is striking is the
retardataire
critical vision (or lack of vision) that many New York art writers revealed. Two examples should make the point. The first is Emily Genauer's determinedly dismissive review, “Art: They're All Busy Drawing Blanks”: “Light that failed: About two years ago, Rothko changed his palette. The sunny yellows and misty blues gave way to blood-browns, with sometimes a bar of white for contrast. The bands went vertical instead of horizontal. The paintings are still primarily decorations—but for a funeral parlor. I'd as soon wrap myself in a shroud as in one of them.”
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Genauer sets out to skewer Rothko's paintings by lifting Selz's words out of the context required for them to make sense. “The open rectangles,” he writes in the catalogue, “suggest the rims of flame containing fires, or the entrances to tombs, like the doors of dwellings of the dead in Egyptian pyramids behind which the sculptors kept their kings ‘alive' for eternity in the
ka. . . .
These paintings—open sarcophagi—moodily
dare, and thus invite the spectator to enter their orifices. Indeed the whole series of these murals brings to mind an Orphic cycle . . . the artist descending to Hades to find the Eurydice of his vision. The door to the tomb opens for the artist in search of his muse.”
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It is indeed difficult to see how this mixture of Egyptian and classical references could help a viewer understand a Mark Rothko abstraction. But what it does reveal is Selz's struggle to find a verbal equivalent for decidedly nonverbal works of art. This passage presents Selz at his most poetic, reaching for some way to explain that which is, finally, ineffable. He seems to be proposing that Rothko's abstractions may be best understood as an expression of spiritual yearning, universal and timeless, and the artist's way of coming to terms with the inevitability of death. Emily Genauer just did not get the metaphorical essence.

John Canaday represents another misunderstanding of Rothko's art and Selz's effort to provide a framework in which it could be fully appreciated. Like Genauer, he describes Rothko's abstractions as “decorative,” albeit “great decoration.” What follows is interesting beyond the artist and the show itself, however:

 

Offering an explanation for Mr. Rothko's progressive rejection of all the elements that are the conventional ones in painting, such as line, color, movement and defined spatial relationships, Peter Selz . . . states that the “paintings disturb and satisfy partly by the magnitude of his renunciation.” This is nothing but high-flown nonsense if we begin with the assumption that the audience for painting today is anything but an extremely specialized one. But it makes sense if we understand to what a degree the painter today has become a man whose job it is to supply material in progressive stages for the critic's esthetic exercises.
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This may be
New York Times
critic John Canaday at his most reactionary, but he nonetheless makes a thought-provoking observation about the relationship of artists to critical writers and museum curators, not to mention galleries. Even Peter, given other contexts and artists, would agree with what is now acknowledged to be a more or less mutually beneficial alliance.
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Futurism
(1961), which came directly on the heels of
Mark Rothko
, was
a first of a somewhat different kind. Futurist art also had not been showcased in an exhibition, major or otherwise. When Peter introduced Art Nouveau as a phenomenon worthy of both attention and a major exhibition, it was, he said, “like bringing in something that had been discarded. So that was controversial.” In the context of his career at MoMA, he went on, “In general, I would say that almost all the shows that I did, and that I've been doing since then, were never mainstream. The third show that I did was
Futurism
. At that time, Futurism was considered an aberration away from Cubism, because they didn't know what they were doing—a misunderstanding of Cubism. Or, that they were Fascists—which they were. [laughing]”
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