Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  Another, even more dramatic, example of New York parochialism, according to Selz, was the response of many critics to his 1959 New Images of Man exhibition, his first after arriving at MoMA. In some ways that exhibition represented Peter’s throwing down of the gauntlet. He absolutely insisted on not just stylistic but also geographic latitude as he set about defining the modernist creative universe. Having spent three years at Pomona, he had discovered artists in California whom he believed worthy of broader recognition.

  From California I picked three people: Rico Lebrun from the south, and from the Bay Area new figurative movement, Nathan Oliveira and Richard Diebenkorn. And New York screamed; the critics didn’t like it at all. They thought the idea of showing totally unknown people whom nobody in New York had heard of—let’s say like Oliveira and James McGarrell—with the holies, de Kooning and Pollock, was heresy. It was really bad. You know, “This guy couldn’t tell what’s in from what isn’t in.” So in general the response to that show was pretty negative . . . because this was the time that the New York School was “it,” and the only thing that was happening was in New York. And here I come [from Pomona College], and in the very first show I do at the Museum of Modern Art I did two terrible things: I showed artists from the American provinces, and I brought in artists from Europe. So the most “in” kind of journals, like Art News, hated the show and panned it.32

  Another hallmark of Selz’s years of exhibiting and writing about modern and contemporary art was his refusal to accept that the modernist impulse could be contained in any critically or art-historically constructed box, or that abstraction was the measure of significance in art. Modernism and significant originality were simply not so limited. The context for this battle involved Willem de Kooning and his fundamental connection to the figurative tradition, something that Selz understood more fully than did most other New York writers and curators. In this, he had the benefit of his graduate focus on German Expressionist figuration and a keen interest in the various Chicago figurative movements. He spoke of his interest in a “newly emergent” figuration after Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. “This was a time when very few people looked at anything which wasn’t Abstract Expressionism, which wasn’t abstract. And when de Kooning painted his women, people were saying, ‘Well, these are really abstract paintings,’ which de Kooning, of course, thought was totally ridiculous. He wanted to paint pictures of women. The most important people in New Images of Man, the key artists, were de Kooning, Dubuffet, Bacon, and Giacometti.”33

  • • •

  The years at the Museum of Modern Art were heady ones for Selz in many ways. Leaving the quiet, idyllic college campus at Pomona and becoming immediately immersed, without much preparation, professionally or socially, in the high-powered Manhattan art and museum world had to be both exciting and stressful. The job was all-consuming, a situation that Peter admits had a negative effect on his young family and his marriage. But there were other experiences, either within the museum itself or related to the influence his job gave him, that began to shape the person he was to become. Surely the society in which he moved as one of the Modern’s leading curators gave him greater self-confidence and sophistication. Artists and others were paying attention to him, hoping that their careers could benefit from his interest in them and promotion of their work. Selz remembers this as a difficulty he had to learn to finesse. And it may be that for him, a social creature very interested in people, separating enthusiasm for the artist as a person from judgment of the work itself was a complicated and even compromising process: “It became very embarrassing when I was working at the Museum of Modern Art, and I had these artist friends who expected me to do something for them. But they were not at all equipped . . . they were just friends, people I liked.”34

  In New York, perhaps more than elsewhere, success depended in part on whom you knew and socialized with. Peter Selz was open to the new opportunities that came with his position, and he readily availed himself of many of them. How judiciously he did so may be questioned, but there is little doubt that living and working in New York in the first half of the 1960s molded Peter Selz in the city’s ambitious and worldly image.

  The situation at the museum offered notable advantages, but as a Jew he undoubtedly ran into certain obstacles. The degree to which Peter perceived his being a Jew as an impediment to his career and ultimate happiness is difficult to assess now. He says that he thought about it very little, that it was not an issue. The minimal attention granted to what must have been a significant factor in his life, starting with his early years in Munich, suggests a personal strategy of denying obstacles to achieving the life he imagined for himself. Here, in the MoMA years, may be the best place to record the few anecdotes about anti-Semitism that Peter deems worth telling.

  His experience as the only Jew among the workers at the Rheingold brewery has already been mentioned. In New York, one experience stood out in Selz’s mind as a reminder of the second-class position of Jews both at the museum and in professional cultural life more generally. Peter’s lengthy account suggests that the incident stands, in his memory at least, for his broader experience of discrimination:

  There was this retreat in Northeast Harbor, Maine, in the summer of 1960, maybe 1961. Anyway, they decided to have a retreat to talk about the future of the Museum of Modern Art. The director, René d’Harnoncourt, and all the department heads were invited to the huge estate of William Burden, president of the board. The Rockefeller cottage [nearby] was a wooden building about a block long. Edsel Ford had his place there—it was the richest of the rich. And I remember Arthur Drexler saying to me, “Do you realize, Peter, that this is the first time any Jews have been on this island?” Referring to himself, me, and Bernard Karpel, who was the original librarian at MoMA. . . .

  There was not a single Jewish museum director in America at that time. . . . You had to be New England or you had to have a foreign accent like René, who had a combination of French and German, a European accent. That was all right. But Drexler and I made an imprint. We were not head of the museum, but we were chairmen. And Jews were [previously] not in these positions. . . . In the lower levels there were Jews— but no blacks. . . . Jews were not at the highest level, because they would have to move in society. They had to raise the money.35

  What is interesting is that Peter Selz says he felt very little, and attended to even less, the subtle discriminatory mechanism at work. As he looked back to his days at MoMA, he saw little or no evidence of anti-Semitism. When asked if he personally noted the presence of discrimination, he passed over it lightly: “I noticed it. I noticed it, and when Drexler made this remark about being the first Jews on the island, I was amused . . . because I didn’t feel anything. I felt no personal anti-Semitism at all. But it was still prevalent.”36 With this statement, Peter is downplaying the actual situation at MoMA and most other museums. In a contemporaneous Art News editorial, Thomas B. Hess famously wrote that “when trustees go shopping for a director, it goes without saying that no Jew need apply (unless, naturally, he has changed his name and religion).”37

  It is almost as if Selz decided to banish from his mind this lingering blemish on post–World War II society, at least as it affected him personally. The self-image he was constructing simply did not allow for racial or cultural insults to be acknowledged. He says that this coping device went back to his Munich childhood. Who he was and what he was becoming had no room for such unpleasant distractions. In fact, Peter tells stories about the Jewish “question” as amusing anecdotes, not as anything that had a particularly negative effect on him—an example of his remarkable ability to apply positive spin whenever events called for management. The following “good story,” as he calls it, exemplifies this skill to neutralize by appearing to trivialize what others might find seriously offensive.

  In Hanover, West Germany, negotiating loans for his 1963 Emil Nolde exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter was talking with Dr. Bernhard Sprengel, a major co
llector of modern German art after whom the Hanover art museum, opened in 1979, was named and from whom MoMA borrowed heavily for the show. The director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Dr. Alfred Hentzen, joined them for dinner and proceeded to sound Selz out on another directorship that was about to open.

  “The director of the state museum in Hanover is about to retire. Would you be interested in his job?” So I said, “No, I would not. But thank you very much.” Two days later, the same people: “The director of the Kestner Gesellschaft”—an early museum of modern art, like the MoMA in New York . . . they’re still doing great shows—“is leaving. Would you be interested in becoming Generaldirektor of all the art museums in Hanover?” I said, “Why are you offering me this job?” And they said, “Well, we discussed it and we thought it would be good to once again have a Jewish museum director in Germany.” They would not say anything like this in Germany now. But that generation didn’t know the implication of this offer, and of course I said no.38

  The critic Dore Ashton, Peter’s friend, fellow activist, and frequent collaborator, was less generous in her appraisal of the situation at MoMA. Among his colleagues, she may have been the closest to him in terms of an ideological approach to art. Above all, they were and remain political allies, as Ashton’s comments in her interview reveal: “The Museum of Modern Art at that time didn’t harbor many Jews. I think Peter may have been the first with a major job there. He had that to deal with. We talked about that, among other things. He was forced to associate with the kind of people that he and I don’t admire. . . . I don’t know all the details . . . but surely that was difficult for Peter, as it was for me.”39

  Some years later, another close woman friend of Peter’s, this time a Californian, shared with Peter a travel experience that cast light on his deeper feelings about Germany, the Holocaust, and anti-Semitism. A native San Franciscan, Marianne Hinckle had worked as a researcher and writer for her brother Warren’s literary and political magazine, Ramparts, associated with the New Left, and the subsequent Scanlan’s Magazine. In 1976 in Italy, after visiting some friends at the American Academy in Rome, she was writing for various local English-language journals in Milan and discovering the Italian world of art and culture firsthand.40 She first met Peter in Venice as they were both touring the Biennale. She had supper with him that evening and the next day joined him and German author Hans Maria Wingler for lunch at Café Florin. Wingler asked her to join them in Berlin, where Peter was scheduled to give some lectures. With the spirit of adventure that had taken her that far, she accepted the invitation.41 She describes the visit as a good “introduction to Peter’s German background and influences.” She could see that being German influenced his entire approach to the history of art, and she began to understand also the influence that growing up in a nonobservant Jewish family had on his personal identification as a Jew.

  The following year, Marianne accompanied Peter on another trip to Germany, where he was gathering art for a German Expressionist exhibition. In Essen they saw an exhibition about Nazi art and architecture, which included a scale-model proposal for the redesign of Berlin as the “capital of the world.” “I’m not sure Peter had ever seen this, but it made a big impression on both of us,” Marianne remembers. Then, driving to Munich, they passed the exit sign for Dachau, and Peter told a chilling story. The year before, he had been traveling with an artist and they took the Dachau exit to tour the notorious camp in which thousands of Germans were exterminated at the hands of their countrymen. “Peter told me there would always be a little old lady in a cottage, nearby or across the fence, who would say, ‘It’s all a lie. We didn’t kill any of the Jews.’”42

  A few days later, in Munich, they decided to see a recently released documentary on Hitler. During the preceding year, Peter had been considering another invitation to return and take a post as a museum director. Marianne did not think it was a good idea. “Peter by now was too Californian, I thought, too broad and poetic.” But he remained torn by the overture. During their travels, Peter had been “sentimental” about his childhood, even under Hitler. Seeing this movie, though, brought Peter back to dark reality. This postwar bio-documentary about the rise of Hitler, depicting the general unemployment and aimless youth ripe for organization, made the appeal of Hitler’s rousing speeches “almost understandable. You kind of got carried away in the emotion, the propaganda of the film,” said Marianne. Not understanding German, she could respond only to the visuals; however, when the movie was over, she said, “Peter, let’s just sit here for a while. I want you to listen to what people are saying around us.” They sat there until almost everyone else had left, and then she asked what he had heard.

  “Marianne, they said things would have been different if we [the Germans] had won the war.”

  Marianne said, “There’s your answer.”43

  This incident seemed to dispatch any inclination Selz might have had to repatriate as a German Jewish intellectual.

  • • •

  Peter Selz’s career at the Museum of Modern Art can best be defined by the artists and work he presented as the first curator of modern painting and sculpture exhibitions. He conceived and organized many shows personally, while some were developed from his ideas but assigned to others, primarily his associate William Seitz. One of the most important exhibitions was to be a retrospective for Willem de Kooning. There was every reason why the two MoMA curators would enthusiastically embrace this project. Seitz had done his dissertation on Abstract Expressionism, and Selz had already built a reputation on a modernist view combining figuration and painterly abstraction, the hallmark of de Kooning’s most important work. In addition, there are interesting parallels between de Kooning and Selz in their individual experiences of coming to and thriving in America.

  De Kooning’s immigration story was not that of Selz, but there were similarities in their almost effortless assimilation through attraction to the fast pace and excitement of their new home. Neither spoke English well when they arrived, and to a certain degree both were loners, although Selz managed to remedy that situation fairly quickly by immersing himself in the social world of art galleries. And both successfully reinvented themselves (Selz several times) in response to the very different American environment. But perhaps most important, they both witnessed and later participated in—one as an artist, the other as an art historian—the transformation of American art from a parochial reflection of European models to the so-called triumph of the New York School. As American critics in the 1950s celebrated the shift in the balance of power from Paris to New York, de Kooning was a leading figure among those artists, mostly immigrants, whose work fueled that shift.

  At the same time, art history was continuing to establish itself as a legitimate field at the leading universities in the country. Selz was a contributor to the eventual Americanization of art-historical writing and publishing. Above all, both men were either at or close to the center of the rise of modernist art in the United States, the most modern nation in the world. And the Museum of Modern Art provided the setting for the paths of these two immigrants to converge.

  Among Selz’s contributions to an evolving understanding of modernism was his ability to think of it in both nonobjective and representational terms. His specialty was German Expressionism, and he continued to view art through an expressionist lens. De Kooning’s brand of Abstract Expressionism, in which the figure appeared and disappeared, showed a dedication to the best art of the past as well as contemporary stylistic discoveries; in this, it provided an ideal locus for Selz’s expressionist-inspired ideas about modernist art. The artist’s violent women paintings of the early 1950s offer perhaps the best visual equivalents to Selz’s thinking about a new figuration, particularly as presented in his controversial New Images of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. De Kooning was represented in this groundbreaking exhibition by six works, more than any other artist except Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, two other Selz favorites.

  S
elz recalls the regrettable cancellation of the de Kooning show as due to reluctance on the part of the artist:

  I would go to his [de Kooning’s] studio and admire his work. And then Bill [Seitz] and I decided to give him a retrospective. He withdrew for many reasons, including one involving Mark Rothko. Mark and I had taken the train down to Washington, D.C., to see a big Franz Kline retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. There was a sign saying that this was a memorial exhibition because Kline had just died. Well, de Kooning was there, and Mark said to Bill, “I hear the next show at MoMA is your memorial,” having just looked at the announcement of Kline’s death. I don’t know if that was a Freudian slip. And then he of course said, “I mean retrospective.”44

  Rothko’s slip of the tongue may have put de Kooning off on the idea of the exhibition, but another reason for his change of mind, according to Selz, lay squarely on Seitz’s shoulders. In Peter’s words, his curator “really screwed up.” Seitz knew a great deal about Abstract Expressionism, “far more than anyone else.” But at that particular time he seemed to be more interested in the conceptualist Marcel Duchamp than in the painter de Kooning. Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with the subject of their show: