Peter Selz (39 page)

18.
Frank Holland, “World of Art: Society Opens Exhibition of Chicago Art,” undated and unidentified clipping, Selz scrapbook, 1940s–1950s.

19.
AAA 1982, 16–17.

20.
Ibid., 18.

21.
MoMA (Zane), 13–14.

22.
AAA 1982, 17. This revised notion of a heretofore homogeneous Bauhaus style and program was the subject of a recent exhibition,
Bauhaus 1919– 1933: Workshops for Modernity
, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (8 November 2009–25 January 2010).

23.
AAA 1982, 18.

24.
Ibid., 19.

25.
Ibid.

26.
Author interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, Seattle, 25 July 2008, 9, 13; hereafter Spafford/Sandvig interview.

27.
Ibid., 26.

28.
Ibid., 51.

29.
Ibid., 23.

30.
Ibid.

31.
Phone conversation with Charles and Zelda Leslie, 5 May 2008.

32.
Spafford/Sandvig interview, 23.

33.
Phone conversation with Charles and Zelda Leslie, 5 May 2008.

34.
AAA 1982, 19–20.

35.
Ibid., 21.

36.
Panel discussion, Laguna Art Museum, 15 March 2009: “Alternate Universe: 1950s and 1960s—Los Angeles and the Claremont Group.” Panelists: Paul Karlstrom, moderator; Jack Zajac, Doug McClellan, Paul Darrow, and Tony DeLap.

37.
AAA 1982, 21.

38.
Ibid., 22.

39.
Spafford/Sandvig interview, 25.

40.
MoMA (Zane), 2–21.

41.
Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, “Freeways,” in
Los Angeles A to Z
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 157–61.

42.
For the authoritative source on this cultural phenomenon in Southern California, see Dorothy Lamb Crawford,
Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also her more recent contribution on the subject,
A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

43.
AAA 1982, 26–27.

44.
Ibid., 22–23.

45.
Ibid., 30.

46.
Ibid., 31.

47.
Ibid.

4. BACK IN NEW YORK

1.
AAA 1982, 31.

2.
Ibid.

3.
MoMA (Zane), 26.

4.
Ibid., 27–28.

5.
New York MoMA certainly deserves the title of “greatest.” As for first, Katherine Dreier's Société Anonyme (1920) precedes MoMA by almost a decade, with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (1921), just behind. Established by Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray as the “first experimental museum for contemporary art,” the Société in conceptual vision trumped MoMA as a bastion of the avantgarde. For an informative treatment of the history and superb collection of the first truly great modern art endeavor, see
The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America
(New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Press, 2006).

6.
Alice Goldfarb Marquis,
Alfred H. Barr Jr.: Missionary for the Modern
(Chicago and New York: Contemporary Books, 1989). The fascinating story of the “founding mothers,” starting with several pages devoted to Abby Aldrich, appears on pages 59–65. The key role of women at MoMA emerges, but it is not an explicit focus. The history of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism at this all-white male Christian institutional enclave appears only in fragmentary fashion elsewhere. Given the importance of Selz's position at MoMA and his sometimes controversial exhibitions, as well as the fact that he was discovered by Barr, it is surprising that Selz is not mentioned in Marquis's biography. In effect, hers is an abbreviated, somewhat superficial history of MoMA. For a more thoughtful (if less lively and anecdotal), art-historically informed account, see Sybil Gordon Kantor,
Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

7.
Marquis,
Alfred H. Barr Jr
., 63–64. Paul Sachs was secure in his choice, and he had the respect of the committee planning the new museum.

8.
Kantor,
Alfred H. Barr Jr
., 364. Barr's problems with the board and the circumstance of his firing are presented with insight and nuance by Kantor (see epilogue, 354–77). With her exclusive emphasis on Barr, as in Marquis's biography, Kantor gives curators short shrift, further enhancing the Barr legend. Neither Selz nor associate curator William Seitz appears in the index. Dorothy
Miller appears seven times, including a section pretty much her own titled “American Artists Find Their Champion” (234–39). Although she played an early role in recognizing trends in American art, in the 1960s Selz and Seitz, among a few others, were the curators who mounted the significant exhibitions.

9.
Philip Johnson,
Memorial Service for Alfred Barr
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), unpaginated; quoted in Kantor,
Alfred H. Barr Jr
., 365.

10.
MoMA (Zane), 31.

11.
Ibid., 32–33. Peter's account of bringing William Seitz from Princeton to MoMA for the Monet exhibition conflicts with that of Barr's biographer Marquis, who states that “in 1960, Barr brought Seitz as a curator to MoMA” (
Alfred Barr Jr
., 262). Selz confirmed his version in a phone conversation (2 April 2010), however, reiterating that the selection of Seitz as his associate was his, seconded by Barr, and then effected, despite the director's reservations, by René d'Harnoncourt. It was, after all, Peter's department and presumably his decision.

12.
MoMA (Zane), 36. Having interviewed many former staff members, interviewer Sharon Zane was well versed in the inside stories as well as the public programs and exhibitions of MoMA. She did a good job in teasing out of Selz and her other in-house subjects details and anecdotes about the eccentric (some have suggested dysfunctional) aspects of the museum's operation.

13.
Author phone conversation with Selz, 2 April 2010. That view of Malraux's motives is supported by Porter McCray in an oral history interview with Paul Cummings, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 17 September–4 October 1977 (
www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-porter-mccray-12974
); hereafter McCray interview, AAA. This account was considered important enough to be mentioned in John Russell's obituary for McCray in the
New York Times
, 10 December 2000.

14.
McCray interview, AAA.

15.
Author phone conversation with Selz, 2 April 2010.

16.
MoMA (Zane), 34.

17.
Ibid., 36–37.

18.
Ibid., 37–38.

19.
AAA 1982, 31.

20.
Ibid., 38.

21.
Ibid., 39–40.

22.
Ibid., 40–41.

23.
ibid., 41.

24.
Ibid., 41–42.

25.
McCray interview, AAA.

26.
AAA 1982, 42. Selz's use of the word
triumph
in connection with the New York School of painting is a slightly ironic nod to the popular idea of Abstract Expressionist supremacy, as expressed in Irving Sandler's influential study
The
Triumph of American Painting
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970). This markedly chauvinistic assumption was challenged by Serge Guilbaut in
How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

27.
Selz in phone conversation with author, 3 March 2009.

28.
Selz was then, as he is now, sensitive to the resistance shown by the still insular New York art establishment to major talents such as Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, both largely ignored, if not dismissed out of hand, because they were working outside New York City (though they did exhibit there). It amounted almost to professional suicide to insist on plying the artist's trade in regional backwaters such as the Pacific Northwest. The major critics, among them Clement Greenberg and Irving Sandler, sustained that prejudicial view of Tobey's work, despite his being mentioned as a source for Jackson Pollock's “all over” imagery and “drip” technique. Pollock in fact admired Tobey, with whom he exhibited in two 1944 group shows. In a letter (undated, postmark 5 January 1946) to Portland artist Louis Bunce (the two met at the Art Students League in the 1930s when Bunce and Willem de Kooning were studio assistants of Arshile Gorky), Pollock wrote: “New York seems to be the only place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru. Tobey and Graves seem to be an exception.” And in a different letter: “Do you ever see Tobey or Graves? I still like their work a lot.” Quoted in Paul J. Karlstrom, “Jackson Pollock and Louis Bunce,”
Archives of American Art Journal
24, no. 2 (1984): 26.

29.
AAA 1982, 43.

30.
Ibid., 43–44.

31.
Ibid., 44.

32.
The “pan” review to which Selz refers is no doubt the unsigned “New Images of (Ugh) Man” that appeared in
Art News
58, no. 6 (October 1959): 38– 39, 58. While crediting Selz and the museum for being involved in “something more important than a genial contemporaneity” by mounting “a protest against the Abstract Expressionists,” the writer (Manny Farber)—apparently no longer a fan of Abstract Expressionism—takes Selz to task for including Pollock and de Kooning, thereby rendering the whole intent of the show “ridiculous.”

33.
AAA 1982, 32–33.

34.
Memoir 9 (7 January 2009), 30.

35.
Memoir 8 (4 August 2008), 1–5.

36.
Ibid., 6.

37.
Thomas B. Hess, “Editorial: Notes on American Museums,”
Art News
65, no. 7 (November 1966): 27.

38.
Memoir 3, 42–43.

39.
Author interview with Dore Ashton, New York, 16 February 2007, 10–11; hereafter Ashton interview.

40.
Author interview with Marianne Hinckle, San Francisco, 1 August 2008, 8–9; hereafter Hinckle interview. Hinckle was close to the famous
Ramparts
journalist Hunter E. Thompson and interviewed Eldridge Cleaver, among other Bay Area “radicals,” when she was in her twenties. Historian Kevin Starr told her she was “more political” than her brother, Warren (Hinckle interview, 15). From the beginning, politics—“civil rights and the antiwar thing”—were an important connection with Peter.

41.
Hinckle interview, 7. Art historian Hans Maria Wingler was author of a book on Oskar Kokoschka as well as several books on the Bauhaus, among them
Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1969).

42.
Hinckle interview, 20.

43.
Ibid.

44.
Memoir 9, 37–38.

45.
Ibid., 39.

46.
Ibid.

5. M
O
MA EXHIBITIONS

1.
Telephone conversation and typed note from Selz, 27 January 2009.

2.
AAA 1982, 32–34.

3.
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was a leading Protestant theologian best known for his “methodology of correlation,” a synthesis of Christian revelation with existential philosophy. Born in Brandenburg Province, Germany, he emigrated with his family—and with the encouragement of Reinhold Niebuhr—to the United States to accept a professorship (1933–55) at New York's Union Theological Seminary. In 1955 he went to Harvard Divinity School and in 1962 to the University of Chicago, Peter Selz's alma mater.

4.
Paul Tillich, “A Prefatory Note by Paul Tillich,” in Selz,
New Images of Man
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 9.

5.
According to Jed Perl, many artists objected to
New Images of Man
because the artists included “failed to dot their
i
's and cross their
t
's.” Giacometti was the exception. See Perl,
New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 503. Realist Fairfield Porter wrote a scathing review in
The Nation:
“The common superficial look of the exhibition is that it collects monsters of mutilation, death, and decay” (reprinted in Porter,
Art in Its Own Terms
, ed. Rackstraw Downes [New York: Taplinger, 1979], 59). Many reviews echoed this charge.

6.
[Manny Farber,]
Art News
58, no. 6 (October 1959): 39. In fairness to the New York critics, there were more positive reviews of
New Images of Man
than
Selz remembers. Although it is true that much of the imagery was generally described as grotesque and horrific, and that the show could be seen as a challenge to Abstract Expressionism, some critics were willing to consider the stated objectives of the exhibition as articulated by Selz. Among the more sympathetic critics were Emily Genauer (of whom Selz was not a fan), Dore Ashton, Katherine Kuh, and even John Canaday in the
New York Times
. Certainly not all critics, as Selz has it, were upset by or hostile to
New Images of Man
.

7.
For Farber, see also chap. 4, n. 32.

8.
John Canaday, “New Images of Man: Important Show Opens at Modern Museum,”
New York Times
, 30 September 1959.

9.
Aline B. Saarinen, “‘New Images of Man'—Are They?”
New York Times Magazine
, 27 September 1959, 18–19.

10.
Selz,
New Images of Man
, 12.

11.
Saarinen, “‘New Images of Man,'” 18.

12.
Katherine Kuh, “Disturbing Are These ‘New Images of Man,' ”
Saturday Review
, 24 October 1954, 48–49. Coincidentally, Kuh succeeded James Thrall Soby, a trustee who performed as acting director prior to René d'Harnoncourt.