Peter Selz (37 page)

 

Peter has always been able to invest confidence in the people he's worked with, whether aspiring young art historians ready to embark on their own careers, or whether someone like me, not an art historian or even an art history major. I'm forever grateful that he placed confidence in the (then rather lightly tried) skills that I could deploy as reader/editor— skills that could serve us both over the years. That confidence did serve to show me the way to a new career track—one which has brought me enormous satisfaction over the course of five decades.
⁷⁰

Late in life, Peter Selz remains surrounded by a veritable congregation of friends, family members, and colorful admirers. There may be fewer such folk among his colleagues, but those who do maintain contact with him tend to be generally indulgent and affectionate. They appreciate his best qualities and are amused—perhaps even charmed—by his foibles. The following words, written by his step-granddaughter, Kyra Baldwin, seventeen years old and preparing to enter university, put it all into satisfactory perspective:

 

So anyway, I had a great talk with Peter! He asked me why I wanted to go to each school and what I do with my time, and then he just asked me to keep talking. I told him what I had done that day—cut up a Northeastern University sticker and put it back together to spell “another tiny universe” on a windowpane. His eyes lit up. . . . Peter is a supportive, lively grandparent. When we walk into the Berkeley Art Museum or SFMOMA, he knows the people working at the desk. Other museum visitors come up to him and chat. It's a fun experience, spending time with such a well-known man in his element. Peter insists on taking me to see the SFMOMA permanent collection every couple of years; at this point, it is familiar enough to work as a context for other art I see.
⁷¹

It turns out that there is a certain sustained—and sustaining—pattern to Peter's life in art. Despite personal and professional difficulties
along the way, he remains committed to an aesthetic and intellectual ideal that has guided him throughout his life. The passion and enthusiasm—it would not be overstating the case to call it wonder—implanted by his grandfather Drey's expert introduction to the world of great art have only grown over the years. And Kyra's visits to SFMOMA, like Gabrielle's regular trips with her father to the Met, bring the art experience full circle. For Peter Selz, those Sunday afternoon visits to Munich's Alte Pinakothek to study the old masters amounted to a life-defining legacy, the pleasure and inspiration of which he has passed on to subsequent generations.

LOOKING AT KENTRIDGE AND WARHOL

Throughout
his long journey in the subjective, unpredictable, and contradictory world of contemporary art, Peter Selz has steered a focused, if not always steady, course. The study and interpretation of art is almost the opposite of science. Reputations wax and wane—as do the conceptual frameworks employed to identify and measure relative importance. Art is much closer to fashion, especially in a market-driven environment, than most historians or even critics find desirable. Understanding of it is neither absolute nor immutable, and therein may lie part of its attraction. Mystery and enigma are at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

In this fluctuating world, Peter has not feared to adjust his opinions and views when it seemed prudent, most notably with regard to Pop Art. In response to its eventual critical and art-historical acceptance, he revised his initial dismissal. But that partial acknowledgment of a critical “miscall”
does not prevent him from maintaining an unassailable humanist position in his appraisal of two highly significant figures, one the star of the second half of the twentieth century and the other perhaps the most important, in Selz's view, in recent and current art.

In 2009 Selz had the opportunity to visit two concurrent major retrospectives in San Francisco:
Warhol Live
, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum; and
William Kentridge: Five Themes
, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
¹
The pairing was fortuitous and instructive. There could hardly be a better way than through a comparison of these two artists to illustrate the enduring aesthetic beliefs and personal values that Peter Selz brings to art.

Critic Leah Ollman characterizes Kentridge's art in terms that would resonate with Peter's thinking:

 

References to particular social and political circumstances abound in Kentridge's films, as well as in his prints, drawings and theater productions. His art is permeated with the texture of resistance yet it remains open-ended and thus is antithetical to propaganda. While it does share with agitprop art an immediacy, emotional urgency, and accessibility, it targets no particular person, class or regime as much as the broader, erosive power of forgetting, the phenomenon of “disremembering.” The moral dimensions of memory, the discontinuities it provokes, the burden of its light (or shadow) are all present in Kentridge's deeply affecting films.
²

Her words neatly pinpoint the elements of Kentridge's art that Peter Selz finds most compelling and expressive of his own values. Seated among the roof garden sculptures at SFMOMA, following the last of five visits to view
Kentridge
, Peter spoke for the record on what he learned there:

 

Kentridge
is one of the most exciting shows of contemporary art I have seen, certainly since I saw the [Anselm] Kiefer show at MoMA some years ago. [In terms of modernism,] Kentridge has put it all together. . . . His method is located in early filmmaking. He makes films, engravings, drawings, photographs. He comes originally from the theater . . . at the same time he has all these important references to history, to politics, to art, to narration. He brings it together like nobody has done before. This man is one of the few contemporary artists who I think is a genius.

Peter
went on to describe his visits to the show almost in terms of a pilgrimage, one that represents his deepest feelings about what art can and should be in the modern world:

 

I've seen this show many times, and I heard him lecture at Berkeley. In the
Magic Flute
he records all this light music of Papageno and shows Sarastro as the wise man of the Enlightenment. At the same time, he shows people chopping off heads as the colonialists were bringing the Enlightenment to the Dark Continent, specifically the German genocide of the natives of German Southwest Africa. . . . I think of him quite a lot, and what I see is a continuation of existentialism because, especially in
The Nose
—but also in other works—he's interested in the absurd. And that's what you see— the existential talking about action in face of the absurdity of life.
³

When asked what connections he would draw between Kentridge and earlier modern art, Selz was at no loss for words on the subject. He framed his response as a challenge to Pop Art and color-field painting, two phenomena he resisted in the early 1960s:

 

I would say [Kentridge] is the opposite of Pop Art. And in a way, Warhol and the other Pop artists are very much like the color-field painters of the same time. . . . Marshall McLuhan called that “cool” art. “Hot” art came before, drawing from Abstract Expressionism. And Kentridge is . . . entirely on the side of “hot” art, with all kinds of energy. There is no energy that I get from a Warhol painting. Or, well . . . a painting by Frank Stella. . . . Leo Steinberg wrote an important essay in which he said the mind is part of the eye—[and I see the mind] lacking in the “cool” art.

As for the connection to earlier modernism, I was happy to read and, when [Kentridge] came to Berkeley, to hear directly of his great admiration for Beckmann. . . . I see the same deep connection to the human being and to history, the continuity of history, in Kentridge as I see in Beckmann. . . . And certainly Picasso comes to mind [and the other] great figurative artists of the twentieth century—and expressionism. But Kentridge goes back further, to Goya. And it's that tradition which I think is most important.
⁴

Selz wrapped up that idea with a reference to a recent conversation he'd had with his neighbor and friend Ariel. In one of their many discussions of what makes good art, how one may define it, he told her that “good art is a visual metaphor for significant human experience.”
⁵
That, he said, was
precisely the quality that was missing in the Warhol retrospective at the de Young Museum. For Peter, Kentridge has it; Warhol does not. Selz cites Kentridge as the only living artist who comes close to Kiefer in metaphorically depicting significant human experience.

Selz's 1963 rebuke of Pop Art has clung to him throughout his career. At the time, Peter and most of his colleagues at MoMA were becoming somewhat marginalized by their resistance to new art in general.
⁶
From a strategic career perspective, Peter now looks back at his position as unfortunate. Yet he has not entirely recanted his opposition. In fairness, MoMA was somewhat more open-minded regarding Pop than Selz's vocal antagonism would suggest. Bill Seitz, representing the museum, acquired a Marilyn painting for $250 from Warhol's 1964 show at the Stable Gallery. When Selz called his associate to disparage the show, asking, “Isn't that the most ghastly thing you've ever seen?” Seitz purportedly responded, “Yes, isn't it? I bought one.”
⁷

In an ironic turn of events, Selz may prove to have been at least partly justified. Warhol, as the emperor of Pop, is undergoing rather strenuous reevaluation. His anointment as the leading heir to Marcel Duchamp is increasingly questioned.
⁸
It is not exactly that the emperor has no clothes, but perhaps his suit is off the rack. And if the suit is the sum and substance of the art, then it may be time to question the entire enterprise. If that in fact proves to be the art-historical eventuality, the Peter Selz position, at the time unpopular, may assume the authority of prescience. However the dust on that particular issue settles, the theme in connection with Peter's career remains valid: that is to say, Selz very often swam against the prevailing current of popular interest, critical endorsement, and even scholarly validation.

What is remarkable, and defines Selz's position, is an unfaltering conviction about the way—his way—to approach and understand art and artists. His fundamental and frequently contrary vision of how art best functions as a worthy metaphor for “significant human experience” is unwavering. In the end, it remains the hallmark of Peter Selz's distinctively unconventional life. Seduced by a vision of art, the Munich teenager carried it with him to his new world and found a way to apply it to his life, thereby creating a career, an identity, and a way to be in the world.

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