Peter Selz (16 page)

But as he wrote later, “Motion and speed, the watermarks of the new epoch, have long since been accepted as integers of urban life in the twentieth century . . . that have altered the realities of the human condition.”
³⁹
And the Futurists, anticipating key elements of modernist art, represent both motion and speed. “With a violent burst on the public consciousness, the Futurists demanded ‘that universal dynamism must be rendered in paintings as a dynamic sensation.' As they were conscious of the fact that ‘all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing . . .,' they searched with the fervor of disciples to new religion for the key which would translate their sense of the dynamic into painting and sculpture.”
⁴⁰
One artist who learned these lessons and impressively applied them to his own work was Tinguely.
Homage to New York
was about movement and change, anticipating—among other things—kinetic art. But it was also created from junk, thereby placing itself squarely in the assemblage phenomenon.

Before going to the Modern, Peter proposed an exhibition on assemblage that he called
The Collage and the Object
. Co-organized with William Seitz (who played the major curatorial role), by the time it opened in October 1961 it had been renamed simply
The Art of Assemblage
. According to Peter, the term was made “official” through the Selz/Seitz collaboration: “There was no word for this [before then,] . . . what was going on in New York with Rauschenberg and Kienholz in California. And one day I was working on the Dubuffet show . . . and he coined that word, a
ssemblage
, for his collages cut up from previous paintings
and put together [recombined]. . . . Bill looked and said, ‘Let's call it [the other show]
Assemblage
.' So, that's how the term came into being.”
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Selz insists that the French and English terms are neither identical nor interchangeable. The French term
assemblage
applies only to Dubuffet's work, whereas the American term (pronounced in English fashion, not French) describes the MoMA exhibition and is now widely used to describe a specific phenomenon.
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Exemplified in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, it is also still evident in some of the most interesting and inventive California artists working today.

Peter believed that assemblage, like the kind of art presented in
New Images
, was being neglected. In the latter case, this neglect was due largely to the strong representation of figurative art among the works in the exhibition. Assemblage, in contrast, approached more closely modernist ideas about formalist abstraction. Its constituent parts—discarded junk—had a myriad of associations beyond themselves, but in no respect did their combination as art adhere to strict Greenbergian ideas about formalist purity.

Selz's next major one-person exhibition surveyed the development, from an increasingly chauvinistic American perspective, of the “outsider” French artist Jean Dubuffet. Selz represents his show as almost introducing Dubuffet to New York and an American audience, a claim that is not entirely justified. However, he did encounter this
art brut
(naive or “primitive” art) iconoclast in France many years before, while he was there on his Fulbright Fellowship. And Dubuffet was a hero in Chicago, appealing to sensibilities shared by some of the younger artists with whom Peter kept company in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But the important point is not one of discovery and introduction, but rather of the inclination and willingness to make the commitment of a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, in effect giving the Modern's imprimatur of approval to a difficult foreign artist who worked decidedly outside the mainstream. And the reason for that seemingly bold step was Selz's ongoing interest in figurative innovation as a viable expressive alternative to abstraction and related formal concerns within modernist art.

In his review of the exhibition in the
New York Times
, John Canaday quotes a statement of Dubuffet's that elucidates perfectly Selz's attraction
to the Frenchman's art. Interesting in this review is the dramatically different tone struck by Canaday when compared to his harsh dismissal of the Russian American Mark Rothko:

 

For some years Dubuffet has been called the most important French artist since the Second World War, a position that he can now be said to hold without serious challengers. Such challenge as he has been offered for the same title in the international field has come not from a single painter but from the group called the New York School—Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and the others. But the challenge has become weaker within the last couple of years as these Americans have given increasing evidence of having reached an esthetic stalemate. . . . The exhibition, hung chronologically . . . ends with a group of paintings done in 1961 in which Dubuffet abandons an approach that had become very nearly completely abstract for one that is essentially humanistic. “I believe that my paintings of the previous years avoided in subject and execution specific human motivations.”
⁴³

Even the prominent critic Harold Rosenberg seemed sympathetic to Peter's way of thinking about the artist. In a long and thoughtful review of a second Dubuffet retrospective at MoMA (1968), he quotes Wylie Sypher, who called Dubuffet's art “the supreme embodiment of brute matter from which all human presence has been eliminated.” Sypher continues on this tack as he attempts to identify what separates Dubuffet from other modernists: “In Dubuffet's painting . . . man becomes anonymous and both painter and figure are absorbed into a turbulent geography that has the quality of mineral or mud. Dubuffet reaches a ‘zero degree' of painting.”
⁴⁴

This idea of total human absence, however, may be misleading, or at least incomplete. Looking at the same art in a less nihilistic way, and with an eye to twentieth-century art that preceded it, Rosenberg also quotes Selz from the earlier MoMA exhibition: “Among his [Dubuffet's] contributions to primitivism are his aggressive formulations of its theoretical premises. ‘Convinced that ideas and intellectuals are enemies of art,' wrote Peter Selz in his catalogue for the huge Dubuffet retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, ‘he began a systematic search for “true art,” untouched by artistic culture and unspoiled by contact
with the Western classical tradition.'”
⁴⁵
Both Selz and Rosenberg seem to recognize that Dubuffet represented a highly original and thoroughly different artistic vision from that of New York Abstract Expressionism and its immediate American successors, but one that was equally valid and possibly more potent in modernist terms. In 1962, Peter Selz had insisted that was the case—that modern art was expansive and inclusive, bound neither by geography (including within the United States) nor by narrow definitions of what is significant in contemporary art.

Peter took pleasure in introducing less familiar modernist art and artists, such as Dubuffet, to what he imagined to be a receptive museum audience eager to learn. With
Emil Nolde
, he did just that, returning to his roots in German Expressionist painting. Sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany, the exhibition was in fact a collaborative retrospective, by far the largest show ever devoted to the artist; Selz selected the two hundred works and wrote the long catalogue essay. Apparently people especially loved the watercolors. It opened on 6 March 1963 (see
Fig. 14
) and ran to 30 April. The exhibition then traveled west to both the San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Art Museum. What distinguished
Nolde
from the standpoint of Selz's involvement was the collaborative ambition, an approach that appealed to Selz as a way to tackle large projects. At one point he and Seitz were considering a twoman show with Nolde and Beckmann, but they decided each artist was far too important to share the stage. Selz's participation in
Nolde
and his book
German Expressionist Painting
, which had served to open up the field, were recognized by an award from the Federal Republic of Germany, signed in Bonn by the president of the republic, Dr. Heinrich Lübke—an Order of Merit, First Class, for interest in twentieth-century German art, presented in New York on 18 September 1963.

Peter takes great pride in his track record of “firsts,” even when his ideas were brought to fruition by others. Another big collaborative project resulted in the groundbreaking
Rodin
show of 1963.

 

Believe it or not, the Rodin show was the first ever held in America. There were many Rodins in American museums, but nobody had done a show. So I decided to do it, with most of the loans coming from the Musée Rodin in Paris, and we had all kinds of problems.
Curator Madame Cécile Goldschneider did not answer letters; René d'Harnoncourt had to go to talk to her directly. I couldn't do everything myself, so I asked Albert Elsen, who had been writing on Rodin, to do the catalogue. . . . I did this show in '63, and Elsen was my friend at the time; he wrote the monograph. So later on he told people that it really was his show. He had moved to California; he was at Stanford. So I confronted him and said, “How can you say this was your show, Albert? This was my show and you did the book.” “I say it was my show, and if you don't like it, you can sue me.”
⁴⁶

The exchange that Selz cites here took place at a dinner table in the home of a prominent San Francisco collector. Its intensity, particularly on Elsen's part, was shocking, even for a man known for his volatility.
⁴⁷
But recalling the event in 1994, Peter said only, “This is the kind of thing one runs into. We haven't talked since.” Professor Albert Elsen died in 1995.

Among Peter's favorite artists, two in particular were especially close to his heart: Max Beckmann and Alberto Giacometti. It is almost certainly no accident that—at least from the standpoint of synergism—they were the subjects of his final two exhibitions at MoMA. One a painter and the other primarily a sculptor, both were figurative modernists. And it could be further claimed that each embodied the qualities that Peter Selz clung to as representative of meaning in modernist art.

The catalogue for the Beckmann exhibition demonstrates in every aspect Peter Selz's devotion to his subject.
⁴⁸
Starting with Peter's long main essay, through Harold Joachim's brief commentary on Beckmann's prints, and closing with Perry T. Rathbone's affectionate “Personal Reminiscence,” the catalogue is lovingly constructed to honor its subject. Selz's lead essay occupies ninety-five pages, albeit with seventy-six carefully chosen and discussed illustrations. The essay is divided into nine parts and follows Beckmann's journey from Leipzig through various European cities to, in 1947–50, St. Louis and New York. Selz's attention is divided equally between the man and his art, an approach that was not necessarily in high critical favor at the time but one that proclaimed the fundamental humanism of both artist and writer. This theme runs throughout the exhibition as well, placing Beckmann in a virtually unique position within modern art.

In
discussing individual works, Selz devotes most of his attention to
Departure
(1932–33), the famous triptych that is in MoMA's collection (see
Fig. 1
). Peter begins his discussion of this masterpiece by quoting Alfred Barr, who described the work, when it was displayed at the museum in January 1951 as a memorial to Beckmann, as “an allegory of the triumphal voyage of the modern spirit through and beyond the agony of the modern world.”
⁴⁹
These words provide the key to Beckmann's importance to Selz, who writes, “Beckmann wished his paintings to remain private and personal, to communicate a feeling but not necessarily to be understood in the literal sense. He used the human figure and a diversity of objects because he wished to have every means at his disposal in order to speak most effectively: not only space and color and shape, but also the active human figure.”
⁵⁰

Selz then quotes his museum colleague James Thrall Soby, who describes the triptych as “one of the major works of art our century has thus far produced.” Noting that the Beckmann often hung at MoMA on the same floor as Picasso's
Guernica
, Soby considers the two very different masterpieces as providing proof that “modern art's symbolism can be as forceful, moving and impressive as anything produced in earlier centuries.”
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Selz picks up and expands upon this idea with a statement that reiterates his own understanding of modernism and its relationship to art of the past. For him, the critical difference between
Departure
and
Guernica
lies in the area of specificity:

 

The iconographic program and meaning of the great frescoes on the walls of San Francesco in Arezzo [Piero della Francesca was among Beckmann's favorites] or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or even those in the Ajanta caves, becomes clear once the key has been found. But it is an
essential aspect
[italics added] of modern art, even when natural forms are retained, that much of it must remain unintelligible. (And this is even truer of
Departure
than it is of
Guernica
, a painting that makes reference to a specific historic event. . . . ) At a time when the media of communication . . . spare no effort to avoid interference, “noise,” any kind of imprecision, the poet and painter set up all kinds of traps and impediments precisely to resist any easy approach. The ambiguity and unpredictability, so germane to the modern spirit, must find expression.
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Later,
in the section devoted to Beckmann's three short years in America, Selz further reveals his allegiance to the artist by citing Perry Rathbone's “splendid” 1948 St. Louis exhibition that launched, according to at least one critic, recognition of Beckmann as “one of the most important living European artists.”
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Selz then offers an explanation for the tardiness of Beckmann's reception that goes right to the heart of MoMA's own philosophical and programmatic orientations: “This acknowledgement has been slow in coming because modern art was equated solely with French art by a great many influential critics and collectors; also, other groups were imbued with a type of reactionary chauvinism that came amazingly close to the Nazi view Beckmann had battled many years earlier; and finally, his arrival to the United States coincided with the emergence of an abstract expressionist idiom considerably at variance with Beckmann's own style.”
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