Peter Selz (32 page)

Jane was a member of the Society for Art, Religion, and Culture (ARC) in New York; Alfred Barr also belonged to ARC and had a lot to do with
arranging loans from MoMA, including the Matisse chasuble, secured by Jane for an exhibition she curated at the Newark Museum. Both Barr and his curator Dorothy Miller were interested in spirituality in art, and this provided a MoMA connection for Jane. Interviewing Barr some years later for ARC, she learned that his father had been a professor at the Presbyterian Seminary in Chicago and that as a young man Alfred had collaborated with his father on a course in church history in which he presented a slide lecture on the history of religious art. But despite this fortuitous access to MoMA, Jane does not remember “being with Peter in the period that I was in New York, though I was in the Museum of Modern Art a lot.”
⁷⁴

The two had to relocate to California to discover one another and their similar experiences studying art history at the University of Chicago. They establish what turned out to be a lasting friendship in which spirituality had an important, possibly central, role. It was in Berkeley that Jane and her then husband, John Dillenberger, met Peter and found a somewhat strange area of mutual interest, or rather an unexpected basis for it. John and Jane were mainstays of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a West Coast counterpart to the New York institution where Paul Tillich, who wrote the prefatory note for Peter's
New Images of Man
catalogue, taught for over twenty years.
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What is so fascinating about this connection, which illustrates the complex nature of Selz's alliances, is the bond that developed between the self-described atheist and a couple dedicated to their Christian faith and its highest humanitarian and spiritual goals.

It was natural for Jane Dillenberger, given her friendship with Selz, to go to him with her proposal for an exhibition at UAM on American religious art. She had already secured the participation of Joshua Taylor at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Art (now Smithsonian American Art Museum). As Jane recalls, “Peter knew Josh Taylor from Chicago [he had been Peter's dissertation advisor] . . . so he signed on to have the exhibition here [Berkeley], and it was Joshua Taylor who named it
The Hand and the Spirit: Religious Art in America. . . .
I was curator of that show . . . [Taylor] contributed to the catalog and we made the choices together, but I was the person who located everything. And in those
adventures I again had contact with Peter.” The exhibition opened in 1972 and “I remember strolling through with Peter . . . I had included a George Inness painting, which was called
September Afternoon
. [All the other artworks had religious imagery or titles.] Peter came to that and he said, ‘My God, Jane, can't we at least call it
God's September Afternoon?
' He thought it would be just bewildering . . . why it was in the exhibition
. Can't you just hear him saying that?”
⁷⁶

Jane now describes Peter as her friend and frequent collaborator (in 2008 they co-taught a course titled “The Spiritual Dimensions in Modern Art and the Collection and Career of Peter Selz” at his home).
⁷⁷
In regard to his deep interest in Goya, Jane mentions that early interpreters of Goya considered the great artist as an “educator,” perhaps thinking that if people looked at the grotesque and cruel things they do, they would be “horrified, and might turn around and . . . reform.” Her friend's attraction to the demonic notwithstanding, Dillenberger perceived in this an appreciation of ambiguity and complexity, a feature of the modern world that also interested her.

In a later written communication, Dillenberger offers other thoughts on his interest in the demonic: “Peter's books on the German Expressionist painters are a case in point. The sense of alienation, suffering, and rejection of these artists is expanded and interpreted with sensitivity and his own sense of the demonic. Peter believes that his long interest in Goya deeply influenced his sensibilities. Surely Goya's
Disasters of War
must have resonated with his own existence in war-torn Germany. Peter's interest in German Expressionism must be related also to this.”
⁷⁸

Jane goes on to define what she sees as Selz's personal strengths: “I know of no one in the art world with a more passionate and persistent love of art. In his nineties he still attends all the gallery and exhibition openings. He knows and is known to artists, art dealers, museums' staffs, and art historians countrywide. For me professionally and personally he has been a precious friend and colleague.”
⁷⁹
And she sees that his broader social conscience parallels liberal religious thought. What she can say about Peter in terms of a relationship to “faith,” again in the broader sense, is derived from her observation of his work with GTU graduate students. As to whether Selz's proclaimed atheism affected
their work with their doctoral students, according to Jane, Peter offered advice and direction as if he were “a believer.”
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To this day Selz has a very close relationship to the GTU, where he has continued to organize exhibitions and teach seminars. His attachment to the institution certainly is a testament to his friendship with the Dillenbergers, but it goes beyond that. Although the faith-based belief system associated even with liberal religion is not Peter's choice, he seems devoted to this ecumenical theological center of learning and inquiry, which is located a few short blocks from the UC campus. When talking with Peter, one gets the impression that the GTU has been a happier association, at least on a personal level, than was the University of California itself.

Jesuit priest Fr. Terrence Dempsey is a close friend of both Jane Dillenberger and Peter Selz. He spent eight years in Berkeley, from 1982 to 1990, working on a Master of Divinity degree and then a Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union, and Selz served on his doctoral committee. Prior to his arrival in Berkeley, Dempsey had read several books and essays by Peter revealing his preference for art that dealt with social justice. Dempsey admired Selz's humanistic values and vision, finding in them an avenue for dialogue with people who appreciated the religious and spiritual dimensions of contemporary art. Within three months after he landed in Berkeley, Dempsey introduced himself to Peter and signed up for his course on modern art. It was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted to this day. In 1987 Dempsey was named curator of exhibitions at the Graduate Theological Union, where he worked closely with Jane Dillenberger and Selz in choosing artists to exhibit. As a result of these experiences, he was hired by Saint Louis University, where he established the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA), the first interfaith museum of contemporary art in the world. Among the artists featured in MOCRA's inaugural exhibition in 1992 was Tobi Kahn, a New York painter and sculptor with deep connections to his Jewish heritage. Dempsey saw an interesting and compelling connection between Selz's humanism and Kahn's religious identification and introduced them to each other at the opening conference of the museum. Dempsey was right, and Selz has remained a friend and supporter of Kahn and his work.

The
attraction of art history for Terrence Dempsey may have come largely from what Selz presented in his work on German Expressionism, always paying attention to its intuitive and emotional sources. For example, Dempsey now describes the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for example, as “generalized spirituality.” At the time of Peter's retirement in 1988 from the University of California, Dempsey organized a tribute exhibition at the GTU titled
Christo and Peter Selz: The Running Fence Revisited
. Among the things he mentions about his professor is a “strong ethical component beyond just the presence of the human figure.” Dempsey was attracted as a theologian to the issues that Selz raised in
New Images of Man
, saying that they made him seem interested in the “rest of the world.” According to Dempsey, Selz was passionate about the social identity and power of art, a quality Dempsey felt few other academics seemed to possess. Indeed, this quality may be what made Peter curious about religion, if not susceptible.

Whatever the details of what Dillenberger calls the “appetite for the demonic,” Dempsey sees in Selz a “genuine goodness” and a “love of humanity” that he greatly admires.
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Peter's longtime, dedicated association with the Graduate Theological Union is a tangible expression of how belief and nonbelief are, for him, reconciled. Nonetheless, his attempt to put that reconciliation into words remains slightly ambiguous, as perhaps it must:

 

I like the GTU program, combining art with theology. Though I was and am an atheist, I firmly believe in the spiritual quality of good art, as did artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Rothko. And I do believe that good art is more than its material aspect. That is where I differ with Clement Greenberg, and do not think much of artists like Kenneth Noland. I once described good art as a metaphor for significant human values. This can be thought of as spiritual and would apply to an Impressionist painting as well as to the work of Christo.
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Still, with these words the door opens wide enough for a rapprochement between disbelief and a spiritual component that, despite his views on religion, is obviously a powerful ingredient in Selz's core idea of significance in art.

RETURNING TO EARLY THEMES AND PASSIONS

Peter
Selz's personal life took a new turn shortly before his retirement when, on 18 December 1983, he married his fifth wife, Carole Schemmerling.
¹
Throughout Peter's long journey, women have played a central role. His interest in women is practically legendary, and over the years he has had many relationships—some supportive, others combative; some brief and forgettable, others enduring and profound. What they have in common is not the nature of the connection—whether personal, professional, or familial—but a pattern of dependency that has in part defined Peter's life and career. During the retirement years, Carole, more than any other, has knowingly both challenged and enabled him. His prodigious output would have been impossible without her willingness to support and facilitate these last three decades of his remarkably productive career.

With
the marriage and the joining of their two families came a new domestic scene for Peter. Carole brought daughters Mia and Kryssa, ages twenty-three and twenty at the time. In addition, there was Kevin Cox, an African American foster son who had been with Carole's family for seven years. His mother had died in a fire in 1975 when Kevin was sixteen, and Mia brought home her classmate, asking if he could come live with them. She announced to Carole and her then husband that “Kevin needs a mother. Doesn't that make your heart cry?”
²
Carole said yes, it did, and agreed to take him in. Peter's daughters, Tanya and Gabrielle, then ages twenty-three and twenty-two, though out of college and living on their own, were still “very dependent upon Peter.”
³
Both would continue to spend time in Berkeley with their father and new stepmother. Eventually there were four grandchildren: Mia and Justin Baldwin's daughters, Kyra and Rian; Kryssa Schemmerling and David Rawson's son, Wyatt; and Gaby and ex-husband Bogdon Mync's son, Theo. This is Peter's present family configuration, which allows him the pleasures of being a grandparent.

Fifteen years Peter's junior, Carole is intelligent, politically active, socially committed, and an authentic denizen of the art world, in many respects the ideal marriage partner for Peter (see
Figs. 24
,
25
). With her background in the Los Angeles art world—she was particularly close to several artists of the Ferus Gallery,
⁴
which Peter had found so interesting when at Pomona—and her contact in San Francisco with the Dilexi Gallery circle, she brought to the relationship sophistication and an independent nature. These qualities have served her well in dealing with her husband's powerful (and controlling) personality. She remains very much her own person.

Peter and Carole met in November 1979 at a restaurant following a movie that she had attended with architectural critic Alan Temko and his wife, Becky. Alan saw Peter and called him over to their table; after coffee Carole gave him a ride home. What followed was a determined courtship by Peter, but, partly due to their age difference, Carole was “not interested.”
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Furthermore, mutual friends, the artist Hassel Smith and his wife, Donna, warned Carole that Peter was “untrustworthy” when it came to women.
⁶
Peter persisted in his campaign, however (he
commenced by sending her a book on American cartoons—an original offering—which he took back a week later, saying it was his last copy). Three years later she capitulated and moved in. Carole was aware of Peter's reputation regarding women, but something drew her to him. On one level the attraction was what endeared him to many of his students: personal charm, knowledge and love of art, and a fondness for artists, which she shared. And, she confided, she imagined that he was in fact “malleable.”
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She would surely deny that she ever considered him a mentor, but his prominence in the art world promised an interesting life, one that suited her. Furthermore, her children were nervous about her single-woman status.
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By the time Peter retired in 1988, he and Carole had been living for six years on Regal Road in the high-modernist house designed by Berkeley architect Donald Olsen (who had been a student of Walter Gropius and had worked with Eero Saarinen). The International Style house was commissioned by Peter as the realization of a youthful dream—born of his first experience of modern architecture in Stuttgart in the 1930s.
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Carole had become the facilitator of their very active social life, entertaining in this open and art-filled home. She seems to have understood this to be part of her role, one that she graciously performs to this day. In fact, many friends of the couple credit Carole with a noticeable and positive moderating effect on her husband. Her response by way of explanation is that she is Peter's firmest critic, calling him, as she puts it, on relationships with other people and even challenging his judgments on art and artists.
¹⁰
Peter had not experienced this kind of scrutiny and direct critical feedback since Thalia, if then.