Peter Selz (42 page)

9.
Peter Selz,
Living with Artists
notes.

10.
AAA 1982, 61.

11.
For a colorful account of the truly inspired creation of the MoMA film library, the “event that had the greatest impact upon the Museum and its future,” see Russell Lynes,
Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art
(New York: Atheneum, 1973), 108–14. For example: Iris Barry—“an extremely handsome Englishwoman in her late thirties with navy blue eyes, fine features in a long oval face, and shining black hair”—impressed architect and MoMA board member Phillip Johnson so much that he not only offered to pay her salary as MoMA's first librarian but also gave her money to buy a dress at Saks Fifth Avenue (ibid., 110).

It was convenient that a film library was in the original prospectus for the new museum. Iris Barry's new husband, John E. Abbott, was appointed director of the Film Library, although Iris, as curator, actually ran the film program. Sexism has certainly played a role in MoMA's history. Some have made similar charges about the early years at Berkeley's UAM, among them former director Jacquelynn Baas (e-mail, 2 May 2010).

12.
Renan and Langlois met in 1968; in 1969 Selz and Langlois signed an agreement setting out their shared goals. Lee Amazonas, “Guerrilla Cinema-theque Comes of Age: The Pacific Film Archive,”
Chronicle of the University of California
, no. 6 (Spring 2004), 147–49. Sheldon Renan, quoted in a February 1971 interview that introduces Amazonas's essay.

13.
Sheldon Renan, e-mail to the author, 11 July 2010.

14.
Phone interview with Tom Luddy, 9 July 2010. Still angry about the university's treatment of him, Peter, and PFA, Luddy seems to particularly resent dean Roderic Park and Edward Feder, both of whom “hated Peter.” According to Luddy, the administration considered PFA “illegal.” Furthermore, again according to Luddy, film was supposed to have been based at the Los Angeles campus. In
1980, frustrated and humiliated by the administration's treatment of him, Luddy quit and accepted a job offer from Francis Ford Coppola. As director of PFA, he was “going broke,” paid less than the union wages of janitors and slide projectionists.

15.
Many recent books accept this idea of California cultural exceptionalism as a given, taking their lead from Carey McWilliams's classic
Southern California: An Island on the Land
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973). In his introduction, McWilliams asserts that Los Angeles was different from the rest of the country, reflecting on his personal experiences from 1922 to 1951, when the region began to “make a real impact on national and world opinion” (xxi). See also Kevin Starr's
America and the California Dream
series, especially
Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and
Coast of Dreams: A History of Contemporary California
(New York: Knopf, 2004). This sense of “difference” runs throughout the series, part one of which deals directly with art and culture, high and low. For a broader perspective, see Michael Kammen,
Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
(New York: Knopf, 1991). Kammen's most relevant observation in connection with California may be that the concept of invention applies more productively to “developing nations” than to “established ones” (693).

16.
AAA 1982, 57.

17.
Ibid.

18.
Ibid., 59.

19.
Ibid., 62.

20.
Phone conversation with Peter Selz, September 2007. Anecdote published in the author's introduction to the limited-edition exhibition catalogue,
Tribute to Peter Selz
(Sacramento: b. sakata garo, 2007), 21.

21.
William T. Wiley's account “Remembering Peter Selz . . while he is here . .” appears in
Peter Selz: Limited Edition
(Sacramento: b. sakata garo, 2007), 61. It was published in conjunction with the exhibition
Tribute to Peter Selz
held in the b. sakata garo (gallery), Sacramento, 6 November–1 December 2007.

22.
Lucinda Barnes, “Collecting the Moment—The Berkeley Art Museum,”
Chronicle of the University of California: A Journal of University History
6 (Spring 2004): 129–42. Barnes is now chief curator and director of programs and collections at the museum.

23.
Phone conversation with Norton Wisdom, 25 November 2009.

24.
Peter Selz,
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture
(Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1966), 6–7. Shortly before he joined the Bauhaus faculty (1922), László Moholy-Nagy with A. Kémeny published what amounted to a kinetic art manifesto (
Dynamisch-konstruktives Kraftsystem
) in the influential German Expressionist publication
Der Sturm
. An English translation appeared as
Vision in Motion
(Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947).

25.
Richard Buckminster Fuller, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “In the Outlaw Area” [Profile],
New Yorker
, 8 January 1966, 36; quoted by Selz in
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture
, 5.

26.
Author interview with Fletcher Benton, San Francisco, 7 January 2008.

27.
AAA 1982, 58.

28.
Ibid., 59.

29.
Ibid., 60.

30.
Harold Paris, “Sweet Land of Funk,”
Art in America
55 (March 1967): 94–98.

31.
Author interview with Selz for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1999, 14. Published in Paul J. Karlstrom and Dore Ashton,
Crosscurrents in Modern Art: A Tribute to Peter Selz
(New York: Achim Moeller Fine Art, 2000), 20 and 27. What united Rothko and Conner with Nathan Oliveira was emotional content (“soul”).

32.
Selz often featured Conner in exhibitions and articles and regularly describes Conner as one of California's great artists, a figure of national and international significance. In his survey on modern art,
Art in Our Times: A Pictorial History, 1890–1980
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Harry N. Abrams, 1981), Selz reproduces
Child
(1959–60) with the following text: “Bruce Conner's disquieting necrophilic
Child
was created to express his outrage against the brutality of the death penalty. . . . The anguished, distorted, and desecrated head screams in torture. This is a work of unrelieved pain—meant perhaps as a talisman or votive object against unmitigated horror” (396). (Echoes from
New Images of Man
reverberate here.) When asked about the specific ways in which he promoted Conner, Selz starts with his including the artist in William Seitz's
Art of Assemblage
(MoMA, 1961) with two works,
Deadly Nightshade
(1959) and
Last Supper
(1961). “This pretty well established him in NY, but he was never appreciated as much as he deserves” (e-mail to author, 16 April 2010). Peter also brought
The Box
(1960) to the attention of Alfred Barr, who bought it for MoMA despite the fact that it was a “gruesome assemblage . . . which was rarely shown” (ibid.).

33.
Phone conversation with Bruce Conner, 20 June 2007. Famously elusive, Conner initially declined a request to be interviewed for this book. But despite his initial refusal to talk about Peter, he proceeded for almost half an hour to air his general grievances and express indignation about art institutions, most curators and writers, and above all art dealers.

34.
Peter Boswell, quoted by Ken Johnson in “Bruce Conner, Beat Artist and Filmmaker, Dies at 74,”
New York Times
, 10 July 2008, C-13.

35.
Phone conversation with Conner, 20 June 2007.

36.
Interview with Paula Kirkeby for the Bruce Conner Oral History Project, conducted by the author, 26 April 2011, Palo Alto, Calif.

37.
Notes from phone interview with Peter Selz, 2 August 2010.

38.
Deborah Paris Hertz, e-mail to the author, 14 August 2010.

39.
Author interview with Wally Hedrick, San Geronimo, Calif., 10 and 24 June 1974; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, transcript available at
www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-wally-hedrick-12869
. Hereafter Hedrick interview.

40.
William T. Wiley in dinner conversation, Selz residence, Berkeley, 13 February 2009.

41.
Hedrick interview.

42.
Paris, “Sweet Land of Funk,” 57.

43.
See Constance Lewallen, “Commitment,”
Chronicle of the University of California
, no. 6 (Spring 2004): 169–72. From 1979 to 1987, Lewallen was curator of the museum's MATRIX series, established by director James Elliott in 1978. The program featured international and local Conceptual artists of the first and succeeding generations. Current BAM/PFA director Lawrence Rinder served as curator from 1987 to 1997.

44.
Ibid., 169.

45.
Ibid.

46.
Conversation with Peter Selz at poetry reading (Michael McClure and David Meltzer) at Oakland hills home of Carl and Susan Landauer, 14 April 2010. This conversation was followed by an e-mail from Selz more fully describing the origins of the
Funk
exhibition at the Berkeley Art Gallery.

47.
Phone conversation with Peter Selz, 15 April 2010.

48.
Richard Cándida Smith,
The Modern Moves West
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 105.

49.
E-mail to author from Sophie Dannenmüller, 16 April 2010. Dannenmüller is a Sorbonne art history doctoral candidate widely acknowledged as an expert on California assemblage art.

50.
Deborah Paris Hertz, e-mails to author, 9 and 10 August 2010. Unless otherwise specified, these are the sources for all the information and quotes on the extracurricular recreational activities of Selz and Paris.

51.
Deborah Paris Hertz, e-mail to author, 15 August 2010.

52.
Terri Cohn, e-mail to author, 11 February 2010. Cohn, a respected and prolific oral historian, curator, and art writer, is a faculty member and graduate faculty advisor at the San Francisco Art Institute. She describes her training at Berkeley as “incredibly formalist”—valuable, but ultimately having little to do with the direction her artist-focused career eventually followed (e-mail, 15 August 2010).

53.
Terri Cohn in conversation, 8 July 2010.

54.
AAA 1982, 56.

55.
Peter Selz,
Selection 1966: The University Art Collections
(Berkeley: University of California, 1966), 1.

56.
AAA 1982, 63.

57.
Ibid., 64–65.

58.
Svetlana Alpers in
Selection 1968
(Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1968), 77–78.

59.
Typed anecdotal notes sent to author by Peter Selz, 12 December 2008.

60.
E-mail from Rinder to the author, April 30, 2010. Larry Rinder earlier spoke to this part of the museum's history in a conversation with Peter Selz, moderated by the author, Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, 10 July 2008.

Rinder is a true Selz heir in that he was hired to be the first director of a new university museum building—this one at a different campus location, on Oxford and Center Streets. Among other benefits beyond up-to-date earthquake construction, this building would have been more accessible to the Berkeley community. Unfortunately, the initial plan, featuring an exciting architectural design by Toyo Ito, fell victim to the economic collapse of 2009. New plans are afoot, but the financial trials remain an obstacle.

61.
Memoir 1 (1 September 2005), 30.

62.
Ibid., 31–32 and 66.

63.
This account of the efforts to secure the Peggy Guggenheim collection appears in two interviews: AAA 1982, 65–66; and Memoir 1, 30–33. It is remarkable how closely the two accounts—separated by almost thirty years—duplicate each other.

64.
Typed anecdotal notes sent to author by Peter Selz, 12 December 2008.

65.
AAA 1982, 66.

66.
Ibid., 67–68.

67.
Barnes, “Collecting the Moment,” 34–35.

68.
James Cahill, e-mail to the author, 2 May 2010. Cahill had no personal ax to grind regarding Selz; in fact, he enjoyed his frequent visits to Peter's “spectacularly modern house. Those were good parties.” In the same e-mail Cahill described the early exhibitions at the Powerhouse: “Later it was discovered that the floor was too weak to hold a lot of people, and we had to stop using it—few faculty members turned up for exhibition openings.”

69.
As listed in the
Funk
catalogue (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1967), unpaginated. As early as 1967, the list of faculty curators read as follows: Svetlana Alpers, Baroque Art; Darrell A. Amyx, Classical Art; William R. Bascom, Primitive Art; James Cahill, Oriental Art (Cahill succeeded Selz as director for one year); Herschel B. Chipp, Modern Art; Alfred Frankenstein, American Art; Spiro Kostof, Architecture; Juergen Schulz, Renaissance Art; David H. Wright, Medieval Art.

70.
AAA 1982, 68.

71.
Ibid., 68–69.

72.
For an insightful account of Norton Simon's art and political involvement
in California, see Suzanne Muchnic's
Odd Man: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

73.
Memoir 1, 23–25.

74.
Selz, e-mail to the author, 12 May 2010. Peter's account is contradicted by curator Brenda Richardson, who independently cites Walter Horn as supportive of her professional “dilemma” within UAM. She also denies that she expected to become director or even sought that role and goes on to say that leaving Berkeley was personally difficult, but “the right move professionally at the time” (e-mail, 29 April 2010).