Peter Selz (17 page)

This thoughtful and enlightening catalogue ends with Rathbone's “Personal Reminiscence” and an appendix, “Letters to a Woman Painter,” featuring a series of five touching “letters” composed by Beckmann and subsequently read by his wife, Quappi (Mathilde Q. Beckmann), at several venues during the years 1948 to 1950.
⁵⁵
What sings out in Rathbone's reminiscence and also Peter's more art-historical essay is an extraordinary appreciation of Beckmann the man as well as the artist. This way of looking at art and its sources in life experience, however, was soon to become suspect as scholars turned increasingly to an antibiographical approach to understanding artworks.

There can be no question that Selz and Rathbone shared an appreciation of what distinguished Beckmann among modernist artists, his full engagement of the raw life as encountered in the cabarets and clubs of Berlin and, at career's end, Manhattan. They understood that in this demimonde—whether German, French, or American—Max Beckmann found his connection with humanity. Art, for him, was by itself not sufficient. This is evident in Rathbone's chronicle of an evening he spent with Max club crawling in Manhattan:

 

Max Beckmann loved cabarets. For him they represented a sort of microcosm of the world of humankind where he could observe and scrutinize without self-consciousness or embarrassment. . . . For some
reason that he did not explain, he long cherished the idea of taking me alone on a tour of night clubs in Manhattan. . . . We progressed to Broadway in the heart of the theater district to a huge middle-class night club, a grand cabaret such as I had never seen before but which was one of Max's favorite haunts. In this arena for the masses, vulgarity reigned. Here the tables were set in tiers ring upon ring; here the waiters were dressed in exotic costumes, and here we were treated to an elaborate and pretentious stage show with nearly naked girls merely strutting about when not engaged in some gymnastic dance. Surrounded by this extravaganza, Max was totally absorbed . . . stimulated by the spectacle, amused by the deliberately lunatic behavior of humanity.
⁵⁶

Clearly, Selz and Rathbone agreed on the central issue of modernism: its division between the human (life experience and raw feeling), on the one hand, and the formal (self-referential, art for art's sake), on the other. One view had it that in painting the ascendancy of abstraction was obliterating the human factor, a “closeout” that Beckmann viewed with “profound misgiving.” As Rathbone reports, Beckmann considered it his mission to inculcate respect for a humanistic art. “Abstraction was for him a form of
Kunstgewerbe
, as he so often said.”
⁵⁷
Thus, judging from the commentary on Max Beckmann as it develops in the Selz catalogue, modernism's seamless union of the figurative and the nonobjective “wings” was, to a degree, a shotgun wedding.

There is little question about the importance of the human presence, and the human figure, in Peter Selz's ideas of modernity. As much as he appreciated abstraction, and certainly expressionism, the real “work” of art required a constant reminder that it is made by human beings and its highest calling is to address the human condition. In this respect, for Selz, Alberto Giacometti the sculptor is the complement to Max Beckmann the painter. More than any other artists, these two spoke for Peter Selz's view of what matters most in modernist art. It therefore seems entirely appropriate, even if simply fortuitous, that
Giacometti
was Peter's last show at the Modern. And in his view, it was also the most significant: “My last show, the most important I did, opened in June of '65. I left soon after that. . . . It was a great retrospective, from the Surrealist time to the work that he was doing at the time—very, very beautiful. Wilder Green did a beautiful installation, and it traveled around the country. . . . It just
was one of the great retrospectives, paintings as well as all the major sculpture. It wasn't as big as somebody would make it now; we were much more selective.”
⁵⁸
Judging from the small, elegant hardcover catalogue (only 119 pages), the show was a pure distillation of Giacometti's achievement. As is the case with the attentive and admiring treatment of Beckmann, Giacometti is presented as a modernist artist who stands outside schools and movements.

Selz gets directly to the point: “For young painters and sculptors Alberto Giacometti occupies a position apart from all other living artists. His work, neither imitated nor slandered, is out of competition. Like a saint, he is placed in a niche by himself. . . . Although his work, changing relatively little over a period of almost twenty years now, is very familiar, its resources are inexhaustible and the impact of his approach is inevasible.”
⁵⁹
In his introduction, in connection with the postwar grisaille paintings—“out of place in a time when our sensibilities are constantly blunted by the brilliance of fresh and garish color”—Selz presents the artist clearly in just two sentences: “But colors, Giacometti feels, adhere to surfaces, and his problem—the problem of the sculptor as painter—is to grasp the totality of the image in space. His linear painting, nervous mobile drawings, and sculptures of ‘petrified incompletion' testify to a great artist's struggle to find an
equivalent for the human phenomenon
[italics added].”
⁶⁰
Selz's priorities and values become entirely transparent. As in the final sections of the Beckmann catalogue, the personal dimension is emphasized in Giacometti's autobiographical statement. Selz leaves no question that the men and their art are inextricably joined.

Selz makes enlightening connections while traveling in his thinking, and in much of his writing, from the specific—artist, medium, work of art—to the general, and then fluidly back again to the individual. The questions he raised about the way recent and contemporary art were understood and presented both informed and determined his most significant and memorable exhibitions as, for a time, he held forth with a considerable degree of power from his position at the Museum of Modern Art.

Figure
1. Peter Selz, in front of Max Beckmann's
Departure
(1932–33), MoMA 1964. Photograph by Marvin P. Lazarus.

Figure
2. Drey (maternal grandparents) mansion, Munich, n.d. The Drey art and antiques gallery was on the first floor, residence above, and top floor rented.

Figure
3. Grandfather Julius Drey, Munich (?), n.d.

Figure
4. Selz family portrait on the occasion of Adolf Selz's eightieth birthday at Hotel Reichenhall, 1925. Peter is in the front row, kneeling; Eugen Selz stands at the far left; Edgar Selz is standing fourth from left in the third row; Edith (Drey) Selz is fourth from right in the third row.

Figure
5. Peter, age six, with his beloved Bavarian nanny, Rosa, Munich, 1926. Inscribed on the back: “Peterle mit seiner Rosa” (Little Peter with his Rosa).

Figure
6. Edith (Drey) Selz with her sons Edgar (left) and Peter, Munich, 1927. Photograph: Müller-Hilsdorf, Munich.

Figure
7. Peter with his best friend, Herbert Kahn, on a stop in the Tyrol en route by bicycle to Italy, 1934.