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:
I had finished my master’s in German Expressionism, but since I was in France I studied postwar French painting—what was going on right then and there. That was very exciting. Paris was wonderful in ’49 and ’50, all the things happening. . . . There were a couple of other Fulbrights in Paris, spending their time in the archives and the libraries while I was spending my time in the galleries, cafes, and the studios. I had much more fun. Having come from the ID, which was really the most advanced place in art education and the whole concept of new design and architecture, I felt very much at home working with contemporary material.12
But Selz later acknowledged the gap between his own artistic interests and the formalist style and design preoccupation of the Institute. By the time he and Thalia had returned from his Fulbright year in Paris, his attention had shifted markedly to a very different group of artists. Part of the impetus was the discovery of Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, both very influential in the formation of his views and his attraction to particular forms of artistic expression.
Nonetheless, Peter maintained his interest in his German Expressionist subjects, meeting several of them during his European sojourn: “In the early days [of the Fulbright trip], when I was in Germany, I met the people who were still around. There was [Karl] Schmidt-Rottluff, [Erich] Heckel, and then later I met George Grosz—although he was not really an Expressionist.” He visited Schmidt-Rottluff in his studio in Berlin and Heckel in Hemmenhofen and Lake Constance: “Both had remained in Germany during the Nazi period, when they were prohibited from showing their work. They were in what the Germans liked to call ‘inner emigration.’ Both painters talked about their early Brücke work and were very pleased to see this interest from an American.”13
In 1949 in Chicago, Peter had met Max Beckmann and his wife, Quappi. “They took me to tea in a hotel restaurant, and Beckmann seemed interested to talk about the Institute of Design (Moholy’s new Bauhaus), where I was teaching at the time.” Although “I didn’t think of him as an Expressionist either . . ., I realized rather early on that he was the giant of the artists coming out of this group, and I still think he’s one of the major artists of the century.”14
Upon the return to Ch
icago, Peter was eager to get back to work on his dissertation and to resume study of the German modernists. Nonetheless, his experiences in Paris—Left Bank life and the pleasant hours spent in bistros and cafés with artists—reinforced his desire not only to study the bohemian art life but to actually try to live it, a tendency of identifying with his artist subjects that began to set him apart from the majority of his colleagues. Peter and Thalia had even thought about extending the Fulbright stay in Paris, but both academic and economic considerations prevailed.
Back in Chicago, both Peter and Thalia had jobs at the Institute of Design. Thalia taught a film history course, and Peter was teaching full time as well as developing a graduate program in art education, which he ran until he left Chicago in 1955. However, he was becoming dissatisfied with the Institute. His experiences in France and with the artists he became acquainted with there, his reimmersion in the expressionism of his Ph.D. topic, and his concurrent involvement with Chicago contemporary art and a group of “rebellious” young artists called Exhibition Momentum soon cast the school in a new and unappealing light. His earlier enthusiasm waned along with the fortunes of the Institute itself.
Selz describes those years as critical in the formation of his career, for they allowed him to identify the qualities he felt were most significant and meaningful in terms of creative activity. Writing in 1996 in an essay titled “Modernism Comes to Chicago,” he looked back at those years, and particularly at the history of the Institute of Design, and concluded with a declaration of what he most valued in the contemporary Chicago scene. At least in retrospect, he championed the working local artists over the declining academic design school that paid his salary: “When one thinks of the Chicago artists of the postwar period, it is the idiosyncratic Imagists, once mislabeled the ‘Monster Roster,’ that come to mind, [among them] Leon Golub, H. C. Westermann, Irving Petlin. And then we think of their successors, The Hairy Who, The False Image, and The Non-Plussed groups and later individuals, such as Ed Paschke, whose expressions, fashions, and often raunchy vitality relate to the Second City in a manner forming a significant contrast to the utopian optimism of the Bauhaus tradition as exemplified in the Institute of Design.”15
Elsewhere, when explaining what attracted him to German Expressionism, Selz goes on to discuss personal art tastes and interests that inform his own work—exhibitions, essays, books, reviews—throughout his professional life:
I guess it was the vitality of the art—the emotional, the anti-formalist, the anti-Bauhaus quality of the art. These two things were very closely related . . . my interest in German Expressionism and my contact with the Momentum artists in Chicago. This was a give and take, because they learned from what I had to tell them about German art. I was one of two non-artists in the group [the other was architectural historian Franz Schulze]. They had big exhibitions every year and brought important jurors. This is how I first met Jackson Pollock, Alfred Barr, and even old guys like Max Weber. All these people were brought every year, three of them, to jury the shows. They were regional shows of this Midwestern avantgarde, and that’s where I met a lot of artists.16
Selz’s natural position was aligned with the individual and the subjective, rather than the communal and the objective (pragmatic, social). This aesthetic led him to many artists who operated independently and who certainly would not fit in with the Bauhaus idea of a utopian art designed to transform society. A good example is the selection of artists for the University of Chicago’s 1947 exhibition of contemporary Chicago art, an early demonstration of Selz’s strong inclination to look beyond the New York art world.17 This exhibition, an innovative effort by the Student Committee (of which Peter was chair) of the Renaissance Society in which students selected the artists who then submitted works, received favorable attention in the local press. A review by Frank Holland described it as presenting “a more balanced and true representation of local art than is achieved by the Art Institute’s annual.”18 At the opening on July 11, S. I. Hayakawa gave a lecture titled “The Semantics of Modern Art.” The sophistication of this program no doubt reflects upon the committee chairman’s knowledge of modernism, but it also is a reminder of the intellectual climate and resources at the University of Chicago.
Selz’s attention was more and more being directed to Leon Golub and the artists of the Exhibition Momentum group—among them George Cohen, June Leaf, Cosmo Campoli, and Ray Fink. These artists, some from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), others from the Institute of Design, many with opposing views, were however united in their response to the SAIC’s decision to exclude students from its juried annual exhibition of works by artists from Chicago and vicinity. They mounted their own annual exhibitions, which in Peter’s judgment were better than those at the Art Institute. Though they did not have a unified style, they were working from the human image. The expressionist figuration that characterized much of their work drew him to them much as he had been drawn to German Expressionism.
While looking closely at Chicago artists, Selz also reestablished connections with contemporary New York art, making discoveries that countered some of his earlier convictions:
Around 1950 . . . I knew what was going on in Chicago. I read ArtNews and also knew what was going on in New York. I went there and began to meet some of the artists. The first one I met was Ad Reinhardt, and that became a lifelong friendship. That was very important. . . . Why? Because there was somebody who had altogether new ideas. He hated [Abstract] Expressionism. . . . So, I began to see and learn and meet people, and I think he [Reinhardt] was my prime contact with the New York school. But I also began to have contact with the New York museum people, dealers, and artists while I was in Chicago. And being at the Institute of Design itself was important because of the people coming through. There was this constant give and take also between [the ID and] the other Bauhaus, Black Mountain [College, in North Carolina]—people like [Josef] Albers, [Herbert] Bayer, Bucky Fuller, and many of the old Bauhaus people came by.19
Now finished with his dissertation and growing increasingly disenchanted with the Institute of Design, Peter began putting out feelers for another position. But, as he observed, “jobs were still hard to find in the mid-1950s.”20
Selz attributes the decline of ID to a lack of purpose: “The brilliant old place, really the whole Bauhaus idea, was falling apart. . . . It was an ingrown place. . . . In a way the purpose was no longer quite there. It had been achieved. . . . Modern design had been accepted.”21 Later, however, as he began to develop a broader and more inclusive understanding of modernism, he softened his negative view of the Institute of Design, arriving at a more balanced idea of the complexity and diverse component parts of modernism: “Eventually I more or less took a historic view. I also began to see the connections [with] the Expressionists—after all, the Bauhaus started as an expressionist thing and then later moved in a different direction—and I met [Walter] Gropius and [Ludwig] Mies [van der Rohe} and all those people.”22
The cash-strapped ID was soon to be absorbed by the Illinois Institute of Technology, pretty well destroying its once fabled reputation as the great center for modern art. According to Selz, everybody was trying to get out—including him.
Then fate stepped in. In 1954 at the annual College Art Association conference he presented a paper on Herwarth Walden, the great modern art impresario of Berlin. As Peter remembers it, the paper was well received. And fortuitously, art historian Richard Krautheimer was in the audience. At about the same time, Pomona College, one of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, had launched a search for a new chairman because Seymour Slive (who had come from Chicago) was leaving to go to Harvard. “The president, E. Wilson Lyon, did the right thing,” Peter recalls, “and went to the Institute of Fine Arts [New York University], asking Krautheimer whom he might suggest: ‘I heard this very good paper by this young man from Chicago.’ So it was through Krautheimer’s recommendation that I was offered the Pomona job [as art department cha
ir and director of the gallery].”23 Selz at that point was delighted to leave Chicago. “California seemed wonderful and Pomona College was very good.”24
Why was California “wonderful”? At that time, a successful career either in teaching art history or in museum work was unimaginable outside the northeastern seaboard. Why would Selz, at least in his retrospective telling of it, embrace what must have seemed like something of an exile from the “serious” American art world, within the narrowly focused field of art history? Even then he saw his own pattern developing, the most significant aspect of which was openness to the new—modernist art, alive and constantly changing. So although many might have questioned the professional advisability of a move to California, Peter apparently saw it as an opportunity. Besides, he and Thalia had now been married for seven years, and he desperately needed a better job.
Perhaps he was simply grateful for a job at a very good liberal arts college nestled away among palm trees and orange groves, but in fact the three years at Pomona prepared Selz for his role as a distinguished thinker about art and the originator of provocative exhibitions. His personal experience of regional American art, when added to his appreciation of the unusual and original in European art, enabled him to create a fresh vision of the course of modernism.
• • •
Pomona was important for Selz in several ways. For one, he was able to leave the deteriorating situation at Chicago’s Institute of Design for an idyllic college campus that, though set in the sunny environment of Southern California, looked and felt as if it had been transplanted from the northeastern private-college preserve. Tree-lined streets surrounded and penetrated the leafy campus with its year-round grassy quadrangles and vine-covered buildings. At the time, it was known as the “Oxford of the Orange Belt.” As Peter said approvingly, “Pomona was a nice college, academically strong, and people got along very well. It was a calm place and we had good students.”25
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