Peter Selz (31 page)

When pressed on the subject recently, Selz finally explained why he testified. Yet despite his apparently good-faith account, which focuses entirely on his appraisals, his personal motivation remains less than clear:

 

Mark had told me more than once that he wanted to leave enough assets in his will so that his two children would be taken care of. When this provision was taken out of the trust, I hoped that it could be reinstated during the court hearings. Unfortunately, this did not happen. The people who were against the executors claimed that Bernard Reis had
a conflict of interest, as he was both an executor of the estate and the accountant for Marlborough, Rothko's dealer. This Mark knew and must have felt comfortable with it. Reis was a very close friend of Mark's and very much in the center of the art world. Stamos, who was vilified in Seldes's book, was Mark's closest friend and not a self-serving man. As, at the time, I was probably the person most knowledgeable about the value of Rothko's pictures, it made sense for Marlborough to ask me to do the appraisals. They were not the kind a certified appraiser would do, but figures that were as close as I could come, with the sale and auction records that I consulted. Although the court eventually decided against the executors, it accepted my estimates.
⁵⁷

Peter later clarified several important details. He believed that Rothko never intended his children to be so financially independent that they would not have to work, and the Rothko Foundation was established for the support of older artists. What Selz hoped would be reinstated during the court hearings was the provision for funds to go to the foundation for that purpose. That, in effect, seems to be Selz's main argument with the suit by the plaintiff children. But his main justification for his role in the trial is that he possessed the insurance evaluations for the works in the MoMA Rothko exhibition.
⁵⁸

Wayne Andersen agrees with Dore Ashton that their friend should not have become involved in the Rothko trial, suggesting also that the fee clouded his judgment.
⁵⁹
Wayne, however, is disturbed that Dore took the side of Frank Lloyd and Bernard Reis for the sake of Stamos, rather than the side of Rothko's wife and the children. Lloyd was a superb player in the international art business, in which, as Wayne puts it, “crookedness is the name of the game.” With that judgment Peter concurred: “Frank Lloyd was a crook—there's no doubt about
that
.”
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Wayne, who knew Rothko well enough to “have an occasional beer with him,” had his own reasons for distrusting Lloyd. In 1963 Wayne was recommended by artist Robert Motherwell and renowned art historian Rudolf Wittkower to direct Lloyd's new gallery on 57th Street. Lloyd tested Andersen's knowledge of artists by holding up photographs of artworks and asking who painted them. Then, again displaying a photograph, he asked, “Now, how would you
sell
this Rembrandt?”
Wayne, after studying the image for a moment, testing Lloyd's patience, responded, “I don't think it's by Rembrandt.”

“Then who is it by?” Lloyd asked.

Gambling, Wayne said, “I think it is by Jan Lievens.”

For a moment Lloyd seemed trapped. Then he continued brusquely, “All right. Now tell me how you sell it
as
a Rembrandt?” That ended the interview and any possibility of Andersen's association with Marlborough Gallery. David McKee, whom Andersen describes as “impeccably honest,” took the job four years later. In 1972 he left to establish his own gallery, eventually signing on two of Marlborough's most important artists, Franz Kline and Philip Guston—the latter, according to McKee, after a contractual disagreement with Lloyd.
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Both Andersen and McKee consider Peter's role in the trial as minimal and having little effect. McKee, who says he admires Peter for his observations on modern art, views the whole business as relatively unimportant in the Selz story. At the same time, Andersen and McKee agree that Rothko's intentions may have been ignored by the executors and Marlborough. Andersen describes Peter as being “like a media-trapped celebrity caught in a sex scandal,” providing testimony that “reverberates and constantly comes up, even though by now no one seems to remember what testimony he gave or what side he was on, if any.”
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Still, he managed to insert himself recklessly into the middle of a scandal and apparently did not acquit himself well on the stand. In her book on the trial, journalist Lee Seldes goes out of her way to disparage Peter's performance at the trial. She compares his testimony most unfavorably to that of Meyer Schapiro, incidentally one of Peter's heroes: “Professor Schapiro, whose authority in his field was unquestioned, exuded a dignity and honesty that were refreshing after Professor Selz's mocking tones.” Virtually every reference to Selz put him in a bad light as an inconsistent and, overall, ineffective witness.
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Ashton and Andersen attribute these “lapses” to a degree of naïveté. But they can also be interpreted as examples of Peter's innate inability to assess a situation realistically in terms of his own participation and the possible consequences. He is, in Wayne Andersen's assessment, unfamiliar with the idea of delayed gratification.

Probably
the most enigmatic of Peter's close colleagues, Andersen has had an unconventional, but brilliantly so, academic career, in addition to pursuing a nonconformist series of explorations in several unrelated fields, including maintaining Arabian horses in Arizona. According to Andersen, the two met in 1962 in Paris, where Peter introduced him to Leon Golub. Peter was there on MoMA business in connection with the planned Rodin exhibition, and Wayne was able to play an intermediary role in the difficult negotiations with the Rodin Museum for securing loans and overseeing shipment to New York. This encounter launched a friendship that has lasted to this day.

Two fascinating yet somewhat eccentric studies by Andersen,
Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine
(Cambridge University Press, 2004) and
German Artists and Hitler's Mind: Avantgarde Art in a Turbulent Era
(Editions Fabriart, 2007), acknowledge Selz specifically and suggest the basis for their close collegial friendship. Enclosed in Peter's copy of the first book was a brief letter that begins, “Dear Peter, I assume by now your book [
Art of Engagement
] is rolling through the press. [As for
Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine
] I think of it as your kind of book. My book on German art is moving right along.”
⁶⁴
The book is inscribed, “For Peter Selz, for forty years of supportive friendship.” In the prologue to the 2007 book, Andersen acknowledges his debt to Selz in a way that emphatically declares their close personal relationship: “It pleases me to speak of Peter Selz as a supporting friend over the near whole of my professional life. His path-breaking book,
German Expressionist Painting
, was on my study table when I was an undergraduate at the University of California in Berkeley and has been on my desk and frequently opened throughout the period of writing this book.”
⁶⁵
Although Peter displays a very personal approach to modernism in his writings and exhibitions, he still seeks collegial approval. Andersen, in contrast, seems to disregard potential negative criticism. Still, Wayne admires the risks Peter took with many of his exhibitions, singling out 1959's
New Images of Man:
“He alters, you know, pushes. It isn't so much expanding the envelope as it is ripping it up.”
⁶⁶

Andersen's personalism, in which the heterosexual male gaze is brought to bear on a variety of subjects that capture his attention, is echoed in Peter's
writing but in a more subdued way. Wayne, differentiating how he and his friend write about artists, points out that Peter “is interested in artists more than in art.”
⁶⁷
He goes so far as to characterize Peter's writing as “art appreciation” but, intending it as a compliment, adds that it is “the best kind of art appreciation.” Presumably by that he means that it is accessible and entertaining in its anecdotal quality; he appreciates Peter as an effective teacher and storyteller, the kind who can excite students by his passion for art. Like Selz's friend Gary Carson, Andersen also sees in him the ability to discern and exploit patterns, moving in the direction of the startling connections of scholars such as Robert Rosenblum.

Despite his reservations about Selz as a traditional scholar, Andersen wrote a long and appreciative review of
Art of Engagement
for the journal
The European Legacy
. In effect providing a sophisticated independent essay on the subject of art and politics, Wayne makes the valid observation that “Selz's excellent and insightful book [provides] some background history that comes forward into the California context of the 1960s. I am referring to the post–World War I span of years during which Stalin's communism emerged on one side of a common border and Hitler's fascism on the other and when political dissidence altered the flow of modern art. . . . The situation for artists in the German and Russian 1920s helps to clarify the nature of the Californian sociopolitical art while also positioning Selz as a vital presence and participating force in the topic of his book.”
⁶⁸

Wayne's admiration for Selz is based partly on the way Peter sets himself apart, whether unconsciously or strategically, from most art historians. There is something akin to a sliver of envy when he describes Selz as a “barbarian” and an authentic outsider: “I mean barbarian in the ancient Roman sense—an outsider who doesn't speak the same language, dress the same, share the same values [as his colleagues]. A kind of savage—he is prone to outbursts and quick to laugh.” Andersen applies an amusing metaphor to Peter's personal level of control: “His control cutoff point is below that of most others—a thermostat that shuts off at a lower temperature.”
⁶⁹

It is almost as if part of Andersen would like to
be
Peter Selz. According to Andersen, “Peter
and I had the potential of bohemianism and a few decades earlier would have been hippies. The strings that eventually joined us were gnarled and knotty, pulled by associations with the same creative people. One of the most important was Leon Golub.” In typical fashion, Andersen is ready with a colorful anecdote:

 

Leon was featured in critical minds in Selz's
New Images of Man
. His abrasive canvases drew the wrath of the most vocal critic, William Rubin, an ardent supporter of the New York School of Painting. Rubin, whose verbosity matched his pompous outbursts, wrote a scathing review of the entire show that, apart from Golub's canvases, included a selection of sculptures by Cosmo Campoli, also a Chicagoan. Neither was devastated by Rubin's assault. Leon returned the assault as a drawing on plain paper, mailed to Rubin. The drawing depicts Rubin on his knees before a toilet bowl, slurping. Rubin is saying between gulps: “Oh, I love writing art criticism—slurp! Slurp!”
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Perhaps one of the greatest attractions of bohemia, for both Wayne and Peter, is the opportunity to conduct one's life largely outside the restrictive domain of conventional rules, the imagination thereby freed to explore and conjure at will, taking in life as one grand fiction. And the idea of writing one's own life story goes quite far in explaining these two close friends and the adhesive that joins them.

Like Peter, Wayne proudly sees himself as operating outside the mainstream. In his latest book, for example, he questions not only the artistic primacy that scholars and critics have accorded Marcel Duchamp, but indeed his claim of being a “genuine” artist at all. The front-jacket-flap text, which introduces
Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah
(2010) with a warning about what the reader should expect, also encapsulates a liberated bohemian-life “ideal” shared by the author and his friend Peter Selz: “Marcel Duchamp's gift to artists was similar to the Marquis de Sade's gift to sadists—relief from moral restraints, accountability, guilt, and shame.”
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The final chapter, “Guilty Passage,” is devoted to a comparison of Duchamp's
Étant donnés
and Gustave Courbet's
L'Origine du Monde
(
The Origin of the World
), still generally regarded as the supreme masterpiece of erotic art. Andersen's language is, as required by the subject, frankly and boldly sexual. But there is a kind of detachment from the
graphic and crude sexuality that displays a coolly focused analytical mind at work. One might say that, in the relationship between these mutually admiring friends, Andersen operates more comfortably in the realm of intellectual than emotional response to art. And I think in a way he may envy Peter's fundamentally more direct and unselfconscious joy in looking.

In contrast, there is darkness in Andersen's vision that brings to mind the moral fervor of an Old Testament prophet. A brooding quality—a sense of crisis and impending tragedy—informs his harsh scrutiny of Duchamp and, finally, the art world itself. For all his anti-mainstream views, Selz would never go this far. So, despite their collegial sympathy, this is where the two part company. Andersen may be the deeper thinker, but in the end Selz is the life-affirming optimist.

•    •    •

There is an opposing side to what we might call the Selz duality, and it is embodied by his association with an entirely different set of colleagues. Two of them, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and Fr. Terrence Dempsey, who was also a student of Peter's, bring another perspective to Selz the “barbarian” in terms of his collaborative generosity and his loftier interests, redirected from the flesh to the spirit. Jane and Peter traveled paths that could have merged much earlier than actually happened. Jane had switched from studio art to art history at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate shortly before Selz appeared on campus. And, like Peter, she had department chairman Ulrich Middeldorf as her advisor, whose decisive influence she acknowledges: “For both of us [meaning Peter], he was absolutely critical to our careers.” She remembers Chicago, along with the Art Institute, as a place that “redirected our lives.”
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But the two never met there. Nor did their paths cross at MoMA in 1959 and the early 1960s, when, as an art history professor (for twelve years) at Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey, she had occasion to borrow works from MoMA for various exhibitions.
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