Peter Selz (19 page)

Figure
20. Peter with Sam Francis at Garner Tullis's San Francisco studio, 1972. Photograph by Sue Kubly. Reproduced with permission.

Figure
21. Carole and Peter Selz, Eduardo Chillida, and Herschel Chipp (from left) at the site of Chillida's
Wind Combs
(1977), San Sebastián, Spain, April 1988.

Figure
22. Peter, Hans Burkhardt, and Jack Rutberg (from left), at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles, 1990. Reproduced with the permission of Jack Rutberg.

Figure
23. Peter with artists Tobi Kahn (left) and Bruce Conner, 1999.

Figure
24. Carole and Peter Selz marching against George W. Bush's Iraq War, San Francisco, 2002.

Figure
25. Peter and Carole in their Berkeley backyard, n.d.

Figure
26. Peter Selz, 2010. Photograph: Dennis Letbetter, San Francisco. Reproduced with permission.

Figure
27. Max Beckmann,
Large Self-Portrait
, 1919, in the collection of Peter Selz. Drypoint, 9¼ × 7¾ in. (23.5 × 19.5 cm). (Beckmann catalogue raisonné no. Hofmaier 153)

DEPARTURE FROM NEW YORK

Covering
a 1960 appearance by Peter Selz at the Detroit Institute of Arts, local art editor Louise Bruner gave an account of the evening that suggests both the casual informality of such events in the early 1960s and the speaker's awareness of his role in the art world: “After a few introductory remarks about the forthcoming Futurist show he is organizing, which will come to Detroit, Dr. Selz lit a cigarette, leaned on the podium, took a sip from his highball and answered questions from the audience. The first, from me: ‘Does the Museum of Modern Art create taste because of its great influence, or does it guide and reflect taste?' Dr. Selz: ‘It is regrettable but unavoidable that we create taste. We are conscious of this responsibility and try to be diversified.'” Bruner described the curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art as, “by
virtue of this position alone, . . . one of the high priests of contemporary American and international art.”
¹

The 1960s, however, brought a dramatic change to the art world, most notably in New York and specifically at the Museum of Modern Art and the commercial galleries, which were forging an ever closer relationship. Despite Selz's comment quoted above, and a similar assertion by Alfred Barr, the museum's hitherto undisputed position as trendsetter had begun to decline as early as 1950.
²
The emergence of a generation of artists who questioned what was left for them—where they could go with their own art after Abstract Expressionism—is meticulously described in Jed Perl's 2005 book,
New Art City
.
³
It is difficult to trace all the forces at work. There was a shift from the individualistic and romantic art projects typical of the 1950s and earlier to a more cerebral and structural approach to art making. And there were new relationships between artists, critics, curators, and, especially, dealers. Peter Selz watched with disapproval as this change occurred, and he was more than willing to speak out on the subject. The qualities that he valued in artists and in their creations were, in his view, being replaced by a cynical, superficial, “boomtown” mentality. Even Perl is unable to say just how the change came about and in what venues it was recognized as something ominous for the future of American art. According to his account, everything was simply new and exciting. In fact, it
was
exciting, and it was important precisely
because
it was new.

Smitten collectors, most notably New Yorkers Robert and Ethel Scull, did their part to establish a commercial base for the new art. As the prices for contemporary art rose dramatically, museums such as MoMA (in part due to Barr's reluctance to embrace the so-called cutting edge) were increasingly left behind. Reviewer Fred Kaplan described the Scull enterprise in 2010: “A half century ago, before the phrase ‘Pop Art' was even coined . . . Robert C. Scull started buying up dozens of works by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. . . . As much as anyone, Mr. Scull and his wife, Ethel—a fashion plate and socialite whom everyone called Spike—created the market for Pop, making it the occasion for lavish parties, an emblem of high society and the
new face
[italics added] of art in the 1960s.”
⁴

Critic
Sidney Tillim, who started writing about Pop Art as early as 1962, before its “formal debut,” faults the Museum of Modern Art for falling behind.
⁵
He does so, moreover, in a way that calls into question the museum's understanding of American contemporary art in general, its “internationalist preoccupation,” and what he refers to as “crisis” aesthetics that led to an exaggerated focus on the figure (presumably including
New Images of Man
in that judgment). The French art foundation of Barr's modernist canon, along with the Peter Selz–Dorothy Miller figurative emphasis (though it was not a shared perspective), is in effect challenged by Tillim as indicating MoMA's increasing irrelevancy in connection with current art. In 1965, he wrote that the museum's “exploitation of Optical Art as an alternative to Pop has to be considered.” He was responding in part to John Canaday, who in the
New York Times
described Optical Art as the art of our time:
⁶
Tillim acknowledged that MoMA may have recovered some lost prestige through the Optical Art show
The Responsive Eye
, “organized by William Seitz . . . [and] conceived for the purposes of counteracting the popularity of Pop Art, [but] it did illustrate the difficulty the curatorial Establishment has had in approaching modernist art with anything but an international bias.”
⁷
This hardly seems fair in light of the catholicity of the exhibitions produced in Selz's department up to that very year.

Tillim's article goes beyond the Pop phenomenon, however, to point out a general deficiency in MoMA's relationship to contemporary American art. Although he credits MoMA for a series of “informative” exhibitions about American art—“Indian painting, photography, and even George Caleb Bingham”—these shows, he charged, nevertheless demonstrated a fundamentally parochial attitude toward American art that “seems to persist to this day”:

 

It is only in the last few years that the Abstract Expressionists have been honored. But among the first of these was Mark Tobey, who can hardly be described as typical; and besides, the present series of retrospectives seems curiously belated. In the thirties and forties there may have been some justification for the Museum's intransigence. . . . The problem is that the Museum has been ambivalent on the one hand, and aggressive on the other, and has retarded the development of indigenous sensibility
by constantly relating art in America to values that over the years have applied less and less to the problems whose issue now simply repudiates what the Museum down deep still thinks is the mainstream.
⁸

By virtue of his position at MoMA, Peter Selz was able to observe firsthand what turned out to be fundamental structural, ideological, aesthetic, intellectual, and commercial changes in the art world. Previously accepted values of art, including the sense that art could contain profound meaning and even transformative power, were themselves transforming under the “weight” of the ephemeral and transitory. Peter, whose career was built on the belief that form and content together served a serious goal, one not touched by a passing parade of “isms,” did not like what he saw. And he was wary of art history and criticism leading the way for art; rather, their duty was to follow, observe closely, describe, and, when possible, explain. Everything, for Peter, started with the art and the artist.