Peter Selz (28 page)

Among the most susceptible to the Selz appeal was Norton Wisdom, whom Peter reencountered years later at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles (see preface). As a student at Cal (1968–73, MFA), Wisdom was greatly influenced by Selz's lectures and, above all, his exhibitions and museum programs. He admired, for example, the way the art was presented at the university galleries, claiming that Peter's shows were installed as if artists were sharing work with one another in their studios: “An artist doesn't need to have gallery walls to see somebody else's painting. I think Peter was like that: I'm going to do this as an artist who loves art and wants the audience to enjoy it just like he does. Leaning against the wall, salon style, or—hanging from the ceiling. I'm just going to take a flashlight and go into this dark cave, and when it lights up, you're going to have an experience.”
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Whether or not this picturesque image captures Selz's practice or intention, this is the way Wisdom remembers the exhibitions at the Powerhouse and later at the University Art Museum. And by his acknowledgment, their impact did nothing less than point the direction for his own life in art. Wisdom's unconventional materials and crossover performance art reflect Selz's openness to new forms of expression—ideas also picked up from Peter's friend Pete Voulkos, for whom Wisdom served as foundry assistant.

Sidra Stich, who was Peter's teaching assistant in the early 1970s, was especially well positioned to observe Peter's singular style.
²
She studied
primarily with Herschel B. Chipp and is thereby able to compare the contrasting styles of the two modernists in the department. When she later became chief curator at the museum in 1984, Peter had been gone for twelve years, but her observations and memories of the art history department and the museum are informed by a career of paying close attention to museums and the academic art world. Stich gives credit to Selz for his programs—not the least of which was the Pacific Film Archive—and for his success in transforming a relatively undistinguished collection into something very respectable.

Along with other museum staff, Stich expressed disappointment at the lack of use the faculty made of the museum as a teaching resource. She had been attracted to Berkeley because of Selz's reputation as founding director of the museum and his background at MoMA. He was, as she puts it, “a drawing card” for students. But “lo and behold, you arrive and find out there's absolutely no talking between the two [museum and art history department]. Working in a museum at that point was not considered sufficiently professional. The faculty was moving away from the orientation of Peter Selz and other colleagues to a much more sophisticated kind of art history . . . dealing with cultural and intellectual history. That was not what Peter was all about.”
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Despite his acknowledged scholarly contributions with his book
German Expressionist Painting
and his high-level career at the Museum of Modern Art, along with the string of important and provocative exhibitions there and at Berkeley, some of Peter's colleagues considered him lacking in academic rigor. But even earlier, Peter faced the criticism of faculty who considered contemporary and American art, two of his main interests, outside the discipline of proper art history. Men like Walter Horn (who nonetheless was the faculty member who courted Peter to accept the Berkeley offer) and L. D. Ettlinger, trained in the German philological method, were part of an immigrant generation that introduced art history as an academic discipline to this country. This group of academics had arrived in the same influx as the younger immigrant, Peter, but they had been educated in Germany, and many disparaged American postgraduate education.

Furthermore, post–World War II art was still considered the purview
not of art history but of art criticism. Herschel Chipp was the accepted modernist in the department, and although he was trained in the United States, he taught from a more traditionally art-historical platform. Peter's American educational credentials, combined with his interest in contemporary art and his affinity for artists, made him an outsider. The situation was further complicated by the rise of more analytical, intellectual approaches to art history. Among them was critical theory, one of the French-derived philosophical approaches that was sweeping through many university departments, combining such strains as poststructuralism, semiotics, and cultural studies. The Berkeley art history department was conservative in that respect, remaining grounded in archival research, with an emphasis on the conditions, social and psychological, that allow art to communicate. According to University of California intellectual historian Richard Cándida Smith, the department at Cal was heavily invested in the
Representations
group, responsible for “one of the most interesting journals exploring the translation of ideology into systems of representation.” In literary studies, this was called the “new historicism.” These theoretical systems were reflected in an emphasis not on objects per se but in intellectualizing them as expressions of ideology.
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Peter Selz did not have a chance of being accepted in that particular academic environment. However, he provided a nontheoretical approach that was interesting to a number of students at the time, even if he was out of step with his department and the conceptual turn in the art world. Furthermore, what appealed to many students, his identification with artists, also put him on the wrong side of the growing rift between artists and art historians at Berkeley, further eroding his credibility with his more traditional colleagues. In the classroom, Selz was seen as enthusiastic but not deeply interested in analysis. This view is generally qualified by an important caveat: Selz loved the art and the artists, and he communicated his excitement to his students. The best of his students, undergraduate and graduate alike, recognized his interest not just in studying art, but in living it—a quality that has been defining and inspiring for students ever since Mike Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig took his courses at Pomona.

Derrick Cartwright, former director of the Seattle Art Museum, is well placed to comment on Selz as both teacher and museum director.
Cartwright enrolled at Berkeley in 1980, just a few years before Peter's departure from the faculty, and took Selz's survey of twentieth-century sculpture. In retrospect, he feels that this contact with Selz provided the direction for his career. The class was not strictly academic, but it
was
about where to direct your passion. What made the difference for Derrick Cartwright, and what he says led him to choose art history as his field, was the fact that Selz talked from firsthand experience, which set him apart from most other professors. Cartwright appreciated in Selz what some faculty and students viewed as a deficiency: his refusal to embrace analytical approaches over the art itself.

The professor was interested in museums, loved art objects, and cared about students. Cartwright was attracted to the biographical approach to art as a way to understand the sources for ideas, forms, and creative process in the artist's life. Selz was a natural storyteller, and artists such as Christo and the late Jeanne-Claude were among the colorful and often exotic subjects of his anecdotes. As it happened, at that time Selz was the project director for Christo and Jeanne-Claude's
Running Fence
project in Marin and Sonoma Counties, and Cartwright remembers that Selz spoke about the artists from the perspective of a personal friend. He also recalled the excitement of seeing that cloth fence snaking west across the landscape from Highway 101 to the Pacific Ocean.

In an interview, Christo and Jeanne-Claude provided the background for their collaboration with Selz and his artist assistant and companion at that time, Lynn Hershman (now Hershman Leeson):

 

I believe it was 1973 when we got in touch with Peter Selz. We told him that we had a project in California called
Running Fence
—and we needed a project director. Would he be able to recommend someone? Jan van der Marck [Walker Art Center and later the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, wrapped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1969] had been the project director for
Valley Curtain
, and he told us that Peter Selz in California “knows everyone.” Peter came to see us in New York and we expected a list of names and telephone numbers. Instead he said, “I'll do it.” But first he asked, “How much do you pay?”
⁵

Peter disputes Jeanne-Claude's memory on this point, but what matters is that he accepted and served
Running Fence
as a well-connected
figure in the art world. He was ideally positioned to introduce the artists to people they needed to meet to navigate the difficult process of getting permits and winning over a suspicious group of landowners and envious artists. There were eighteen permit hearings (according to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Selz attended only one or two), and a big part of the challenge was to convince the opposition—which was led, ironically, by artist and writer Mary Fuller McChesney and her artist husband, Robert, who lived the bohemian life atop Mount Sonoma—that the project was a temporary art installation, not a “front runner” for developers. As Peter, appreciating the irony, relates the situation, “A committee of disgruntled local artists tried to stop the project, complaining that a bunch of foreigners—a Bulgarian artist with a French wife and a German project director—were about to get national, even international, attention by doing a stunt on their territory.”
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At the hearing, Christo maintained that opposition was an essential and expected part of the project.

Among the best-known supporters of the project were artist Bill Morehouse and, especially, director Francis Ford Coppola. Jeanne-Claude described the process: “The most difficult part of all our projects is to obtain the permits. So the part which Lynn [Hershman] was so good at is the art of getting permits. Meeting each one of the fifty-nine ranchers and their families, explaining the project, trying to get them to sign the contract allowing us to place a part of
Running Fence
on their land. And for that she was fantastic.”
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Hershman's contribution to the project notwithstanding, Jeanne-Claude recognized the great value of having Selz aboard: “In my country, France, we say he had a long arm, and Peter used his.”
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Many of Selz's students maintained contact over the years. Particularly close is Gary Carson, Selz's self-described “aide-de-camp,”
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who found a special way of joining for the long haul in Peter's life. Selz describes Carson as his “son,” and Gary reciprocates by acknowledging a “sort of father/son relationship.”
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Even more significant is his designation as “artist agent.” The latter term reinforces the idea of Selz's identification with artists. Among Carson's responsibilities has been ensuring that Selz stays in touch with the art friends his welcoming personality has attracted. A significant handful of students made a point of staying in
touch over the years, encouraged in this by Peter himself. In Gary's case, the close relationship goes back almost thirty years.

Carson was interested in Dada and Surrealism and related modernist movements that had the potential to change not just art but society as well. In 1973, he independently sought out Selz in his office, and in 1975 he enrolled at Cal. Gary remembers one of his first papers for Peter was on Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, one of the great examples of folk art as an expression of the human creative spirit in a way unparalleled in mainstream modernist art. Peter, with his few years spent in Southern California, knew of them and appreciated their significance. This assignment convinced Carson of Selz's “comprehensive view of art as a living phenomenon,” an individual but synthetic approach to creative activity.

The key qualities that drew students to Selz as a mentor were, according to Gary, careful looking and original thinking—art history from lived experience, popularization at its best. In this intuitive approach, Carson observes a connection to the art historian and renowned creative thinker Robert Rosenblum—whose method Selz admires, if not always his taste. But as Carson put it, both were “open to new perspectives and phenomena,” moving comfortably across media.
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Carson's and Cartwright's undergraduate memories of Selz as a professor hew closely to those of other favored students, prominent among them art historians Kristine Stiles, Moira Roth, Terrence Dempsey, and Susan Landauer and artist Rupert Garcia. For them, Peter Selz was an influential, even inspirational, presence. All have become, in one way or another, collaborators with Peter in both his and their own pursuits. This “working with friends” seems to be a hallmark of his professional modus. Though each had some specific criticism of aspects of Peter's working habits, these former students all expressed an affection and loyalty that defined the relationship.

In 1980, undergraduate Susan Landauer, a studio and art history double major, took Selz's lecture class on contemporary art. As just one of two hundred students, she had no personal contact with her professor. But a friend in the same program did have what Susan described as a more “direct experience,” and as a result she became “wary of him.”
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As she remembers it, Peter stood out in two distinct ways for his female
students: many of them tended to avoid him outside the classroom because of his reputation as a womanizer, but at the same time they were attracted to his undeniable energy in his approach to art. In her admiration Susan was apparently typical, holding these two seemingly contradictory views.
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After graduation from Berkeley, Landauer went on to Yale; there she wrote a pioneering doctoral dissertation on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, which later was published as an influential book.
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The first personal contact she had with Selz came in 1989 with her return to the West Coast, their paths crossing at openings and other art events in the Bay Area. Since then she has collaborated with him on several publications and exhibitions, most notably in her former curatorial capacity at San Jose Museum of Art.
¹⁵
Her introduction to Selz's 2002 monograph on Nathan Oliveira, a surprise bestseller, offers important insights into his approach to an artist whose work he has championed since the late 1950s.