Peter Selz (40 page)

13.
Peter Schjeldahl, “Beasts: Leon Golub's Stubborn Humanism,”
New Yorker
, 17 May 2010, 116–17. The sentences that set Selz off actually recall the terms of the realist/abstraction divide and the outside–New York “loyalty to humanist strains in modern art . . . against the grain of American high art after Abstract Expressionism. A postwar fashion for humanist styles expired in a famous flop of an exhibition . . . which perhaps only Golub, of the younger artists included, survived without despair” (ibid., 117).

14.
Letter from Peter Selz to Peter Schjeldahl, 18 May 2010 (copied to editor David Remnick), Peter Selz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

15.
Jean Tinguely, quoted in D. Hall and P. Wykes,
Anecdotes of Modern Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 350.

16.
Selz video interview conducted by the author for the British artist Michael Landy's
H2NY
, a documentary on Jean Tinguely's
Homage to New York
(1960). The interview was recorded by videographer/documentarian Douglas Weihnacht at Selz's Berkeley home on 12 December 2007.

17.
Richard Cándida Smith,
The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 110. Cándida Smith acknowledges, however, that “given the artists invited to appear [including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella] . . .
Sixteen Americans
seems to have predicted with remarkable accuracy the ruptures about to tear apart modern art in the United States” (ibid.).

18.
See Marquis,
Alfred H. Barr Jr
., 139–49. Miller was married to Holger
Cahill, head of the WPA art programs. There were rumors of an intimate relationship with Barr, which in a 1986 interview she dismissed, saying: “It's not anybody's business. Lots of women were in love with Alfred” (quoted ibid., 141).

19.
Video interview of Peter Selz about Jean Tinguely's
Homage to New York
, conducted by the author, 14 December 2007.

20.
AAA 1982, 34–36.

21.
Memoir 8, 8.

22.
John Canaday, “Machine Tries to Die for Its Art,”
New York Times
, 18 March 1960.

23.
AAA 1982, 36.

24.
K. G. Hultén in handout for Tinguely,
Homage to New York: A self-constructing and self-destroying work of art conceived and built by Jean Tinguely
, Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, 17 March 1960, 6:30–7:00
P.M.
Hultén, later known professionally as Pontus Hultén, was a Swedish collector and respected international museum director. At the time of the Tinguely event at MoMA he was the newly appointed director of the Moderna Museet (Stockholm); he was also founding director (1973–80) of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and from 1980 to 1984 he was in Los Angeles as founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The California connection reinforced his friendship with Sam Francis and added, among younger L.A. artists, conceptualist Greg Colson. Hultén is author of
Tinguely: “Méta”
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1975) and
Jean Tinguely: A Magic Stronger than Death
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1987).

25.
Peter Selz, “Acknowledgments,” in
Art Nouveau: Art and Design at the Turn of the Century
, ed. Peter Selz and Mildred Constantine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1960, © 1959), 6.

26.
AAA 1982, 36.

27.
Ibid.

28.
Ibid., 37.

29.
Selz, “Painting and Sculpture, Prints and Drawings,” in
Art Nouveau
, 55. The Gauguin painting on wood was alternately attributed to the School of Pont-Aven. Selz's essay illustrates Bonnard's
Le Peignoir
(ca. 1892) and the color lithograph
Screen
(published in 1899).

30.
Selz, introduction to
Art Nouveau
, 12.

31.
Ibid., 17.

32.
Meyer Schapiro, “The Armory Show” (1950), in
Modernist Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(New York: George Braziller, 1978), 152.

33.
Memoir 5 (10 March 2008), 22–23.

34.
Emily Genauer, “Art: They're All Busy Drawing Blanks,”
New York Herald Tribune
, 22 January 1961.

35.
Peter Selz in
Rothko
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 12–14.
This paragraph, an attempt to suggest depth of feeling in universal terms, stands out in, and somehow apart from, the rest of the essay. Perhaps more than any other art phenomenon, certainly more than the color-field painting with which Rothko is identified, Symbolism provides a more enlightening context for his work. The rest of the essay is written in Selz's straightforward descriptive style, one that he graciously acknowledges benefits from his editors.

36.
John Canaday, “Is Less More, and When for Whom? Rothko Show Raises Questions About Painters, Critics and Audience,”
New York Times
, 22 January 1961.

37.
For a recent look at how the unregulated commercial (fine) art market impacts artists and their interdependent relationship with critics and curators, see Holland Cotter, “The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!”
New York Times
, 12 February 2009.

38.
MoMA (Zane), 44–45.

39.
Peter Selz, introduction to
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture
(Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1966), 6.

40.
Ibid., 5.

41.
Memoir 8, 7.

42.
Conversation with Peter Selz, San Francisco, 24 May 2010. Selz was adamant on this distinction between the two terms (French and English).

43.
Canaday quoting Jean Dubuffet in “Is Less More?”

44.
Wylie Sypher in
Loss of the Self
(1962), quoted by Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World: Primitive à la Mode,”
New Yorker
, 26 October 1968, 145.

45.
Rosenberg, ibid., quoting Selz in
The Work of Jean Dubuffet
(Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 43.

46.
MoMA (Zane), 78–79.

47.
This feud and the dinner exchange that brought it out into the open are documented in increasingly hostile letters between the two men written between 6 September and 29 October 1980 (located in the 2010 installment of the Peter Selz Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). “I was surprised to say the least,” wrote Elsen on 5 October, “when the other night at a dinner table in front of strangers you complained that you had been hearing that the 1963 MoMA Rodin exhibition was my show. . . . When I pointed out that I had picked the show, you looked as if you wished to challenge that fact. So challenge it now, in writing.” Selz responded on 29 October in a conciliatory but unyielding manner: “I am sorry if I embarrassed you by discussing this matter at our dinner at the Swigs, but I don't think that anyone actually overheard our rather private discussion.” In fact, the discussion was not in front of strangers, as I was there along with prominent collector and art dealer Rena Bransten and, as I recall, Helen Lundeberg, the guest of honor. And, whatever the merits on either side of the argument, it was indeed overheard by the entire table. Peter rests his
case on the acknowledgment of Elsen's role in the exhibition brochure: “I want to express my special thanks to Professor Albert E. Elsen of Indiana University not only for his authorship of the book on Rodin which the Museum is publishing in connection with this exhibition, but also for his essential advice and assistance through the preparation of the exhibition.” The acknowledgments were signed: “Peter Selz, Director of the Exhibition.”

48.
Max Beckmann
opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1 October 1964, before moving to MoMA for a December 14 opening and then on to Chicago, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and London.

49.
Quoted in Selz,
Max Beckmann
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 55. Alfred Barr's tribute to Beckmann appeared on the label for the triptych during its special memorial exhibition at MoMA.

50.
Selz,
Beckmann
, 61.

51.
Quoted in Selz,
Beckmann
, 58.

52.
Ibid.

53.
Libby Tannenbaum, “Beckmann: St. Louis Adopts the International Expressionist,”
Art News
47, no. 3 (May 1948): 21.

54.
Selz,
Beckmann
, 91–92.

55.
Max Beckmann, “Letters to a Woman Painter,” ibid., appendix, 132–34. Translated by Mathilde Q. Beckmann and Perry T. Rathbone, the letters were read aloud by Mrs. Beckmann at Stephens College on 3 February 1948. Subsequently they were read at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; over the radio in St. Louis during the 1948 Beckmann retrospective; at the Art School of the University of Colorado, Boulder; and at Mills College, Oakland, California. They were published in the
College Art Journal
9, no. 1 (Autumn 1949): 39–43.

56.
Perry Rathbone, “Max Beckmann in America: A Personal Reminiscence,” in Selz,
Beckmann
, 125.

57.
Ibid., 127.

58.
MoMA (Zane), 80–81.

59.
Selz, in
Alberto Giacometti
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 7.

60.
Ibid., 11.

6. POP GOES THE ART WORLD

1.
Louise Bruner, “High Priest of Modern Art Speaks Nonobjectively,”
The Blade
[Detroit], 11 December 1960. According to the article, two hundred people attended at a ticket price of $15 per person and $20 per couple, a fairly stiff admission fee for the time. Peter Selz was an art world celebrity. The sampling of thoughtful questions that were featured in the article indicate that at least some among the audience were informed about art and museum issues. One person asked, “Since
critics and museums in the past have been mistaken about the art of their times, why do you feel your taste in today's art is valid?” Selz's response was to the point: “We aren't secure; we only try to avoid pre-established theories of what art should be.”

2.
The changing role of MoMA as the exclusive arbiter of taste in terms of modern and contemporary art was much discussed by critics at the time. This issue seems to have come to a head first in the museum's delayed response to Abstract Expressionism and then a decade later in its lukewarm reception of Pop when it exploded on the scene. See the proceedings of MoMA's
A Symposium on Pop Art
(13 December 1963), organized and moderated by Peter Selz, in Steven Henry Madoff, ed.,
Pop Art: A Critical History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65–81. Especially relevant to MoMA's responsibility to introduce new art is the symposium exchange between Hilton Kramer and Leo Steinberg. Kramer introduced the subject with a comment directed to Steinberg: “I think, Leo, that you are completely ignoring the role that the Museum plays in
creating
history as well as
reflecting
it. It is its responsibility as a factor in determining the course of what art is created that people are objecting to.” Steinberg responded: “Of course the Museum has a role to play in making history . . . but there is a balance of power. The Museum is not alone” (ibid., 77).

3.
Peter Selz was but one of the players in the kaleidoscopic picture of 1960s Manhattan painted by Perl. The role of the Museum of Modern Art is prominently discussed, including the influence of the
Art Nouveau
exhibition (“landmark in the history of taste,” p. 383) that Peter conceived and initiated with a team of specialist curators. Selz's
New Images of Man
exhibition (1959) is mentioned twice (pp. 412 and 503), in each instance as if it represented Alfred Barr's interests and ideas about the role of MoMA in relation to contemporary art. These exhibitions are discussed almost as if they were formed by committee—as if the institution made the decisions and selections, rather than the curators. Selz's recollections differ on that important point. Many living artists remember
New Images
as a major statement against the Abstract Expressionist status quo as finally embraced by MoMA. The idea of who is in the leadership position—artists or institutions—is a major theme in Perl's book.

4.
Fred Kaplan reviewing the Acquavella Galleries' exhibition of forty-four works from the former Scull collection in the
New York Times
, 10 April 2010, C1. In his introduction to
Pop Art: A Critical History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Steven Henry Madoff further describes the changed and changing situation: “What was publicized and debated was driven by a rising power nexus in the art world of new collectors (most notably the Sculls) and dealers such as Leo Castelli, Virginia Dwan, and Sidney Janis” (xv).

5.
By 1962 various critics were writing about the New Realism, also identified as Neo-Dada, under the name Pop Art. In addition to Sidney Tillim in
Arts Magazine
, February 1962, 34–37, most of the other leading critics weighed in.
John Canaday, two years later, as usual carved out the most conservative position: “But whatever Pop is—its patrons and practitioners are still haggling over definitions—it has arrived and gives every sign of staying around at least for a little while. Whether or not Pop is a new art, and whether or not it can last, it has supplied a new bandwagon. And in the art circus as it operates today, that is the final accolade of success” (“Pop Art Sells On and On—Why?”
New York Times Magazine
, 31 May 1964, 7ff.). Ironically, this may well have matched pretty closely the view of Peter Selz, who was definitely no fan of Canaday. Among the other writers paying attention in 1962 were Max Kozloff (“Pop Culture, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians,”
Art International
, March 1962, 35–36); Brian O'Doherty (“Art: Avantgarde Revolt,”
New York Times
, 31 October 1962, 41); and, from the West Coast, Jules Langsner (“Los Angeles Letter,”
Art International
, September 1962, 49). Langsner was reviewing the historic exhibition
New Paintings of Common Objects
at the Pasadena Art Museum. This show was distinguished by the inclusion of artists from California, notably Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha, whose work Peter Selz had become acquainted with during his few years at Pomona.