Peter Selz (43 page)

75.
Brenda Richardson, phone conversation with author, 28 April 2010.

76.
Ibid.; AAA 1982, 69.

77.
Richardson, e-mail to the author, 29 April 2010. Perhaps the most revealing observation Richardson makes is that the entire process was “a travesty carried out by an academic administration eager to take Peter down. Little did he know that when he submitted a complaint about me to the Dean, it would end so badly for him.”

78.
James Cahill, e-mail to the author, 24 September 2010. Other faculty members shared the view that Peter's departure from the museum was involuntary, among them Loren Partridge, art history chair at the time, as well as artist and friend Karl Kasten (now deceased) and medievalist David Wright. Even fierce supporters such as Sheldon Renan of PFA acknowledge that Peter spent money whether or not it was there and/or authorized for projects he believed in. Others viewed the Selz style more positively: classicist Andrew Stewart— who arrived in Berkeley somewhat later—appreciated his enthusiastic embrace of contemporary art and artists as well as his willful independence. Cahill adds that he did “excite students, and draw lots of them.” Cahill also remembers that at his own hiring there were administrative instructions to move away from contemporary art toward “exhibitions and programs tied in with campus departments and organizations” (a strategic effort to secure university education funding for the museum); these were greeted with alarm by UAM staff members who found the direction overly academic. He recalls that Richardson alerted the San Francisco art critics, “who saw this, as did she, as a threat” (e-mail, 5 October 2010).

79.
Jacquelynn Baas, e-mail to author, 29 April 2010. Jackie reports that in the middle of a budget crisis she talked with Clark Kerr and Roger Heyns about the museum's financial situation, which provided insight into the earlier problems.

80.
Tom Freudenheim, e-mail to author, 2 May 2010.

81.
Baas e-mail, 29 April 2010. Jim Elliott was director from 1976 to 1987. Baas became director in 1988.

82.
Richard Buxbaum, phone interview and e-mail to author, 7 January
2010. UC law professor Buxbaum met Selz shortly after the latter's arrival in 1965. Buxbaum also followed Selz's exhibitions, remembering especially the
Funk
show and their shared interest in art.

8. STUDENTS, COLLEAGUES, AND CONTROVERSY

1.
Author interview with Norton Wisdom, San Francisco, 8 April 2009, 2.

2.
Sidra Stich studied with Herschel B. Chipp and Svetlana Alpers; Selz was on her doctoral committee. Although she came to Berkeley because of the museum training program, when she discovered that the art history department was not interested in museum work as a professional career she concentrated on the more intellectual and academic strengths of the University of California. Her contributions to the museum included the highly regarded exhibitions and catalogues
Made in USA: An Americanization in Modern Art, the '50s and '60s
(Berkeley: University Art Museum and University of California Press, 1987) and
Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art
(Berkeley: University Art Museum; New York: Abbeville Press, 1990). Peter Selz considers the latter particularly significant.

3.
Sidra Stich interview, San Francisco, 27 July 2009, 2.

4.
E-mail conversation with intellectual historian and Berkeley professor Richard Cándida Smith, 16 June 2010. As with other writing projects, I am grateful to this friend for suggestions and information generously given.

5.
Telephone interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 27 June 2007, 3–4; hereafter Christo and Jeanne-Claude interview.

6.
Peter Selz,
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 230. The same story was recounted to the author in conversation.

7.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude interview, 11.

8.
Ibid., 17.

9.
Author interview with Gary Carson, Berkeley, 2 May 2007, 18.

10.
Ibid., 17.

11.
Ibid., 12. The late Robert Rosenblum made connections in thinking about art that were unprecedented. Peter Selz brings this same curiosity to his way of looking at art and is at least as willing to graze over the entire creative landscape.

12.
Susan Landauer, telephone interview, 17 October 2009.

13.
Susan Landauer, telephone conversation, 15 April 2010. Landauer, with her deep respect and affection for Selz, has been able to reconcile these “two sides.”

14.
Susan Landauer was among the first to bring attention to Bay Area gestural painting as an independent analogue to New York Abstract Expressionism. Her book,
The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism
(Berkeley: University
of California Press; Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum, 1996), helped to change the way California was perceived by the East Coast critical establishment. Peter's friend Dore Ashton wrote the introduction. The book accompanied an exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum (27 January–21 April 1996) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (18 July–8 September 1996).

15.
Susan Landauer was chief curator at San Jose Museum of Art for a decade, until 2009. Among the books and exhibitions that grew out of the Landauer-Selz museum collaboration were
Nathan Oliveira
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and
Art of Engagement
.

16.
Susan Landauer, telephone conversation, 16 October 2007. Taken out of context, this response seems unlikely, even if one is little concerned with the judgment of others. However, it disturbed Landauer enough for her to relate it as an indication of Selz's deficit in empathy for others, especially (as with Duchamp) women.

17.
Author telephone interview with Kristine Stiles, 25 June 2008, 3; hereafter Stiles interview. Also “Notes for Conversation Regarding Peter Selz,” 25 June 2008, 1.

18.
Stiles interview, 5, 6; “Notes,” 1.

19.
Stiles interview, 15; “Notes,” 2.

20.
In the preface and acknowledgments to
Art in Our Times
, Selz wrote, “I want to express my thanks to the friends, colleagues, and students who have helped significantly in completing this book. Above all I wish to acknowledge Kristine Stiles, whose suggestions were particularly helpful in the final chapters” (n. 7). The index does not recognize feminism as an art term, but many activist women artists make their way into the book, particularly in the chapters where Stiles was most “helpful.”

21.
Selz typically tries to attach himself, often retroactively, to movements that gained favor later. His own complicated relationship to women, and his treatment of them, would speak against his being an early feminist. It is one thing to “like” women, but quite another to fully empathize and understand the professional and social obstacles they are struggling to remove.

22.
Kristine Stiles, e-mail, 10 November 2009.

23.
Ibid.

24.
Moira Roth, telephone conversation, 15 October 2009.

25.
Memoir 10B (22 April 2009), 24. Chase-Riboud monograph: Peter Selz and Anthony F. Janson,
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Sculptor
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).

26.
Performance art, found to be a particularly effective means of conveying feminist concerns, was the subject of an anthology edited by Selz's student Moira Roth,
The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970–1980
(Los Angeles: Astro ARTZ, 1983). For the feminist art movement generally,
see Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds.,
The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s—History and Impact
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).

27.
Author interview with Eleanor Dickinson, San Francisco, 3 January 2008, 19–20; hereafter Dickinson interview. Selz does not acknowledge sexism as a problem at UAM, insisting that he gave full support to women in the museum's programming. Nonetheless, in
Art of Engagement
he describes gender discrimination elsewhere: “Artists began to look for women's art in museums and commercial galleries, finding enormous discrepancies between male and female representation; the ratio of artists being reviewed in
Art in America
in 1970–71 was twelve males to one female” (190–91).

28.
Phone conversation with Peter Selz, 4 August 2010.

29.
Conversation during manuscript review meeting with Selz, 6 July 2010. The report on O'Hagan's refusal to sign the oath appears in the Online Archive of California,
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb738nb7fq;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00002&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere
.

30.
H. W. Janson interviewed by Eleanor Dickinson at the College Art Association annual convention, Washington, D.C., 1 February 1979.

31.
Dickinson interview, 17–18.

32.
Peter Selz, “San Francisco: Eleanor Dickinson at Hatley Martin,”
Art in America
, September 1989, 219.

33.
Telephone interview with Carole Selz, 31 October 2009.

34.
Author interview with Agnes Denes, 15 January 2008, 2; hereafter Denes interview.

35.
Peter Selz, “Agnes Denes: The Artist as Universalist,” in
Agnes Denes
, ed. Jill Hartz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992); reprinted in Selz,
Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 240.

36.
Ibid., 236.

37.
Denes interview, 6 and 7.

38.
Ibid., 5 and 6.

39.
“Anonymous Was a Woman” is taken from Virginia Woolf's
A Room of One's Own
. Denes said, “You look it up on the Web—Anonymous Was a Woman. It's totally anonymous. But it comes with $25,000, so . . . that's all you need to know” (Denes interview, 10).

40.
Denes interview, 12.

41.
Selz, “Agnes Denes,” in
Beyond the Mainstream
, 240.

42.
Paul Tillich,
The Religious Situation
, trans. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Meridian Books), 85.

43.
Selz, “Agnes Denes,” in
Beyond the Mainstream
, 249.

44.
Ashton interview, 2–3, 4.

45.
Ibid., 12–14.

46.
Ibid., 15.

47.
Ibid., 28–29.

48.
Ibid., 15.

49.
According to Selz's account, Rothko's intention regarding distribution of his estate was that the children be provided for but not be made “wealthy.” The Mark Rothko Foundation was established to support older artists, but it was “being pushed aside . . . by the children.” AAA 1982, 73.

50.
See Lee Seldes,
The Legacy of Mark Rothko
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).

51.
Henry Lydiate, “Art After Death,”
www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/art-after-death/artists-estates/the-rothko-wrangle.htm
.

52.
Quoted ibid.

53.
Ibid.

54.
AAA 1982, 73–76.

55.
Ashton interview, 18.

56.
Ibid., 17–20.

57.
Peter Selz, e-mail to the author, 12 May 2010. The longer account in the AAA 1982 interview is consistent in most details with this recent one. But a key element, the stated purpose of the Rothko Foundation, is surprisingly missing in the latter (see note 49 above).

58.
Manuscript review meeting with Selz, 7 July 2010.

59.
Author interview with Wayne Andersen, Boston, 17 January 2008, 45; hereafter Andersen interview. Wayne and Dore agree that Peter made a mistake, but they come at agreement from opposite directions. Both know Peter well enough to allow that the fee played a role, but Wayne downplays that: “He got paid $25,000 [actually $20,000]—the word was it built his house in Berkeley.” However, with a somewhat strange ethical logic, Wayne compares that relatively modest amount to the “millions” that Bill Rubin made “off of artists' gifts” (ibid.).

60.
AAA 1982, 75. In the interview, Peter did not limit the “crook” characterization to Frank Lloyd, adding: “But I think that can be said about any dealer, as far as I've observed.” In truth, Peter has had cordial and long-standing professional and personal relationships with a number of dealers.

61.
Andersen interview, 42–43. This fascinating character study amounts to an indictment of Frank Lloyd that validates Peter's use of the word
crook
. David McKee says he did not leave Marlborough because of the Rothko trial (telephone interview, 13 February 2008).

62.
Andersen e-mail, “Selz,” 7 December 2009. In our 13 February 2008 telephone interview, David McKee used pretty much the same words in describing Peter's role.

63.
Seldes,
Legacy of Mark Rothko
, 255.

64.
Wayne Andersen, letter to Peter Selz, 11 May 2005.
Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine
(London: Cambridge University Press, 2004) is a brilliant analysis of a painting at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is also exaggeratedly unconventional, a combination of thoughtful research and extremely personal interpretation.

65.
Wayne Andersen,
German Artists and Hitler's Mind: Avantgarde Art in a Turbulent Era
(Boston and Geneva: Editions Fabriart, 2007), v.

66.
Andersen interview, 3. Andersen's fundamental irreverence for the field, along with a spectacular ability to conjure up original, almost heretical, art-historical insights, allows him to appreciate the best qualities that Selz brings to his work.