Peter Selz (6 page)

One of the more amusing stories from Peter's career in military intelligence involves a snafu when he and a fellow low-level OSS operative found themselves in Buffalo on a clandestine assignment to test the range of a new transmitter. His colleague was on the roof of a hotel setting up the transmitter's antenna while below in their room Selz was tapping out Morse code, trying to contact Washington, D.C. Someone had apparently noticed the activity on the roof and notified the police. In the midst of performing his duty, Selz was interrupted by a loud pounding on the door. The situation was especially awkward since OSS personnel were forbidden to tell who they were and what they were doing. Undoubtedly, given the understandable paranoia of the times, Peter, with his heavy accent, was suspected of being a German spy. When asked repeatedly what he was up to, Selz could only answer, “I cannot tell you. I must speak to your commanding officer.”

When
that was finally arranged, the officer checked with the D.C. contact provided for such contingencies and was reassured. The two young “spies” were then released and escorted to the railway station to board the next train headed south to Union Station. Peter seems to have been unwittingly involved, at a low level, in preparations for OSS participation in clandestine operations behind enemy lines in Europe. Radio communication was the essential ingredient in the success of covert Allied efforts to disrupt German military movements, to arm and coordinate local Resistance fighters, and to prepare for the landings in Italy and France. After the war, many of the OSS agents would go on to create and run the CIA.
³⁷

A last army story provides insight into Peter's ongoing education and the beginnings of his awareness that it is possible, even easy, to outsmart the system. This lesson could be viewed as the starting point of Peter's evolution into a worldly and sophisticated player in the world.

Several weeks before his date of discharge, Selz was back in Oklahoma at Fort Sill, eagerly awaiting his release. This particular day he was assigned to drive a jeep as part of the artillery training for which the base was renowned. There were frequent stops with nothing to do but wait, so he and some fellow soldiers passed the time by playing blackjack. Behind him in a command vehicle was the officer in charge, and in the midst of the game the card players heard the command, “Move on!”

As Peter drove off he looked behind and saw cards dancing out of the rear of the Jeep. He stopped and turned to backtrack and collect the cards. But in doing so he managed to run his vehicle into a ditch. Knocked unconscious, he came to only as he was being carried out of the ditch. He suffered only minor scratches, but the less fortunate jeep was totaled.

Back at base headquarters, Peter was called into the lieutenant's office. The cost covering the loss of the jeep, three thousand dollars, was a huge sum in 1943, and of course Peter could not pay it.

“Well,” said the officer, “I guess you'll have to extend your tour for six more months to work off the debt.”

Peter noticed that the lieutenant had lying open on his desk a copy of the army field manual, to which he referred for the regulation regarding
repayment in such cases of damage to government property. Peter suspected that if he looked closely enough at the manual, he would find some other regulation that would get him off. It turned out that every GI who drove a vehicle needed a military driver's license. This rule was seldom followed, and his case was not an exception to this loose practice. There was little the captain could do when confronted with this oversight but say, “Okay. Let's forget it.”

For Peter, the lesson was that the individual can beat the system and authority, even the army's. He took this to heart and never forgot. As he now says, “It's all in the research. Most people wouldn't have checked.”
³⁸

The most important aspect of Selz's military service, however, had little to do with these experiences and nothing to do with the war and his wish to contribute to the eventual defeat of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead, in a way that he could not have anticipated when he was drafted, the military opened a new door for him. He was no longer obliged to return to the brewery. In fact, he had very attractive alternatives that fit perfectly into his longtime dream—all provided by the GI Bill.

NEW BAUHAUS AND EARLY CAREER

Upon his
discharge from the army in 1946, Peter set out to identify which university was the best in the country. With the support of the GI Bill he could aim high, and he decided that the top honor went to the University of Chicago. “Chicago had a program more like a European university; you could go straight to the end, sort of catching up [along the way]. . . . It was a wonderful school, the best university, there's no question about it.”
¹
Since Peter had completed only one year of undergraduate work at Columbia, this was an important consideration. “I never did get a B.A. degree. Almost from the beginning I worked on a master's degree and just had to take courses where there were gaps. I tested out of things that I acquired on my own through reading.”
²

In making decisions about how to direct his studies, he could look to his friend Kenneth Donahue, who attended the Institute of Fine Arts at
New York University and, Selz reports, already had a position at Queens College teaching art history. Until he learned of Donahue's good fortune, Selz had no real idea that a living could be made in art other than by buying and selling it. With this new information, Peter decided he would follow his friend's example.

Selz describes the faculty at Chicago in glowing terms as composed of “absolutely first-rate people,” starting with his advisor, Ulrich Middeldorf, who remained a mentor over the years and who became director of the German Art Historical Institute in Florence, and also including Peter-Heinrich von Blanckenhagen (classical art) and Otto Georg von Simson (medieval art). Peter went to work in this environment to “catch up.” Then the time came to make the decision that would both draw on his personal past and distinguish him in his newly chosen course. He describes the process:

 

Looking for a Ph.D. topic, you look for something that hasn't been done. I saw there were books on Cubism, people had already been working on Surrealism, and I saw this enormous gap. . . . There was this 1919 drypoint self-portrait by Beckmann [
Fig. 27
], given to me by a friend soon after I first arrived in America, hanging over my desk. I was looking at it all the time. Before the war, in the New York galleries—Neumann, Valentin, and Nierendorf had brought many of these painters to this country—I was looking at the Kirchners and especially Beckmann.
³

Peter also singles out the importance of William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1924 to 1945 (he later went on to the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, and elsewhere): “He knew German Expressionism very early, and when he came to America in the twenties he collected their pictures. . . . The Detroit museum was the only museum in the country with a whole room of German Expressionist material.”
⁴

The choice of German Expressionism as a dissertation topic was unusual at the time: “I was in a field that had not been discussed much. I was in America, where modern art was still considered to be French art—until New York took over. . . . My professor, Ulrich Middeldorf, agreed that I write not just a small-subject dissertation, like most are. He said, ‘You know, why don't you write—nobody's written about the whole
German Expressionist movement.' I asked, ‘Can I do this for a dissertation?' And he said, ‘Why not?' So it became my dissertation.”
⁵

In a field otherwise dominated by connoisseurship (questions of attribution and formal-stylistic considerations), at Chicago students were permitted, even encouraged, to try different approaches to studying art and writing about art history: “Now, in the way that I understood it, at that point I was looking at art history not just in the formal sense. I had been doing that for too long even then. I was relating [art] to the political background of the Wilhelmian era in pre–World War II Germany.”
⁶

With the benefit of hindsight, Selz now considers that contextual approach and his recognition of the relationship of abstraction to emotional (empathetic) qualities of expressionist art as advanced for the time. His explanation of how he arrived at that approach is enlightening in terms of reconfiguring thinking about art, and it is instructive in the way it drew upon an existing reservoir of theoretical writing. Selz's approach, despite its freshness, seems to have been greatly influenced by German scholarship, notably that of Alois Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer, and especially Hermann Bahr, which provided a basis for expressionist theory: “That was very unusual and rather ahead of its time. But I realized in order to deal with German Expressionism [one must recognize] the move toward abstraction—or rather the abstract-based [style] in which Kirchner painted the human figure—and then to full abstract expressionism in Kandinsky and the Munich Blaue Reiter. I wondered where these ideas came from.”
⁷

During this time Selz was fortunate in the arrival at Chicago in 1950 of Joshua Taylor, just out of Princeton, who took over as his dissertation advisor. Taylor was a preeminent scholar of late-nineteenth-century and modern American art who, like Selz, became known for looking well beyond the mainstream. But regardless of the academic process involved and guidance provided, Selz conceived and, in 1954, produced one of the first two dissertations on twentieth-century art written up to that time.
⁸
Not only did he develop an important dissertation topic but, shortly thereafter, he published a career-making book as well—
German Expressionist Painting
(1957): “I became interested in the theory of abstraction, ideas leading to the book. Despite some needed corrections in the opening chapter about theory, if you look at it now, it
does
seem rather
ahead of its time.”
⁹
Selz was referring to his book, but if the book was, as he says, ahead of its time, the dissertation was even more so.

Peter's personal life was developing in a way that contributed to the direction of his career perhaps as much as his doctoral work did. He met Thalia Cheronis, an art history graduate of Oberlin College, at an art department tea. She was enrolled in the university's master's program in English literature. In 1948 they married, becoming intellectual as well as wedded partners. Both received their M.A. degrees a year later, and Peter immediately started teaching. Along the way, frequent visits with Peter's brother, Edgar, and his family (wife Trudy and son Thomas) in nearby Evanston were an important part of their nonacademic life, although time for such familial pleasures was limited by the couple's work schedules.

In fact, Peter had two part-time positions teaching art history. One was at the Chicago extension branch of the University of Illinois (later called the Chicago Circle campus, and now the University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC). The other job was, as he says, much more interesting and “very, very important.” That is not to say that his position was so important—he was teaching a basic art history survey course and modern art—but the place definitely was, especially for a young scholar embarking on a career as a modern art specialist at a time when the field was brand new:

 

I taught at the Institute of Design—with an interruption of a Fulbright in Paris [accompanied by Thalia]—from 1949 until I left Chicago in 1955. . . . That's when I got totally involved in modern art, with a great faculty. [László] Moholy-[Nagy] was gone—he was already dead—but there were all these others. [Architect Serge] Chermayeff— recommended by Gropius—was director, and some of the best people, Europeans and Americans, came and went. The students . . . came from all over with the specific purpose of being at this place and at this time. It created all sorts of problems . . . we were fighting all the time because we thought this was
the
most important art school in the world. This was the New Bauhaus; this was where everything was happening.
¹⁰

In light of his interest in emotionalism and empathy, it would seem that the Bauhaus precepts and the design and architecture focus of the classes
at the Institute of Design would have been at odds with what appealed to Selz within the German Expressionist aesthetic and the making of an individualist creative life. But at the Institute he found an echo of what he had experienced in Munich and then in New York with the
Werkleute
emphasis on group activity, socialist communalism, and utopian ideals. He described his participation in the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum with a combination of pride and excitement: “The first two years were very much like the foundation course at the Bauhaus: introduction to form creation, color, texture . . . then students went into different fields: product design, graphic design, photography, or architecture. In photography alone there were people like Harry Callahan, who was head of the department; Aaron Siskind and Art Sinsabaugh were teaching there. I think photography was one of the best parts of the Institute of Design. But also the graphic designers—the Institute changed American graphic design. The feeling was definitely that this was the significant place.”
¹¹

The “interruption” of the Fulbright sojourn in Paris in 1949–50, however, helped Peter find his own personal understanding of and relationship to modernist art. To this day he delights in telling how his Fulbright research differed from that of several of his counterparts in Paris. It was as if he and he alone discovered what mattered, how you get close to the secrets of art and the creative life by embracing contemporary art and artists, the makers. And that was not to be accomplished by reading books: