He [Seitz] would go down to Bill’s [de Kooning’s] studio to supposedly work on the show, but he talked about Duchamp—he asked Bill what he thought of Duchamp. And Bill asked me that at an opening one time, “Why is this guy talking about Duchamp all the time?” Bill Seitz was involved with Duchamp at that point, [trying to understand] him. And the other stuff, Abstract Expressionist painting, he [already] knew. . . . Well, what [de Kooning] meant was, “I’m not interested in Marcel Duchamp.” He thought as little of him as he thought of the Abstract Expressionist artists. There was a big, big division between the mind and the paint project.45
When Peter was asked which side he would come down on if he had to choose between the intellect and the feelings, “the mind” and “the paint,” he not surprisingly returned to his roots in German Expressionism and the emphasis on personal subjectivity: “I was never as impressed with Duchamp as many of my friends were. I found him an extremely interesting phenomenon, but I’ve never seen a work that moves me. But when looking at a de Kooning painting, my heart palpitates.”46
Throughout his career, when it comes to matters of art, Selz has been guided by intuition, instinct, and emotion. He feels his decisions about art and is guided by those feelings at least as much as by the mind. Certainly no one could accuse Peter Selz of following the cerebral dictates of theory, like many of his colleagues and almost an entire generation of their students did. So it is sadly ironic that the debate between these two approaches, as perceived by de Kooning in any case, contributed to the cancellation of an exhibition that would have been a fitting expression of Selz’s thinking about modernist art, in which de Kooning occupied an iconic position.
FIVE MoMA Exhibitions
FROM NEW IMAGES OF MAN TO ALBERTO GIACOMETTI
When asked to identify his most important exhibitions at MoMA, Peter Selz selected six: New Images of Man, Mark Rothko, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, Max Beckmann, and Alberto Giacometti.1 In each case they represent a different and revealing aspect of his thinking about modernist art.
Before he left Pomona for New York, Peter was asked by director René d’Harnoncourt to propose three shows he would like to mount as curator of modern painting and sculpture exhibitions. His list represented interests he had nurtured since the Chicago days and that still inform his perspective on what constitutes modern art. It was also noncanonical; that is, it challenged or enlarged upon the Museum of Modern Art’s take on modernist art as established by Alfred Barr. The three exhibitions he proposed, all of which were realized during Selz’s tenure at the Modern, were New Images of Man, Art Nouveau, and The Art of Assemblage. Peter believes that his list clinched his getting the job at MoMA. And the implication is that Barr, to the extent that he was still involved in guiding the exhibition program, and d’Harnoncourt were in fact more open to fresh thinking about modern art than the then-accepted Barr canon might indicate. Selz’s proposals, however, do raise a couple of questions: Why did Selz choose these relatively unexamined topics to present at the world’s most prominent showcase for important modernist art? And what do these choices tell us about his personal understanding of modernism? The answers appear fairly readily throughout the interviews, in his descriptions of what distinguished each exhibition.
In fact, perhaps more than any other aspect of his career, Peter loves to talk about his exhibitions:
I felt that the New Images and Assemblage shows dealing with contemporary work, which had somewhat been neglected, and an historic survey of Art Nouveau, which had been totally neglected, was a pretty good balance. What I was trying to do with New Images—put together in 1958 and shown in 1959—was to present something I’m still very much interested in, a newly emergent figuration after Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. . . . I was very much involved with this kind of art, and in the catalogue of the show I was drawing parallels between the new figuration and existentialism. Paul Tillich wrote a preface to the catalogue, and I see it now as a pretty important document for some of the artists’ thinking at the time. I was really concerned at that point with an artist’s response to the world situation, let’s say the world after Buchenwald, Hiroshima, and World War II—the existentialist attitude.2
One may well wonder why Peter, an avowed atheist, would choose a famous Christian theologian like Paul Tillich to introduce what Peter viewed as an exhibition of secular humanist images.3 When asked about this, Peter paused for a moment before his response. The first thing he mentioned was that Tillich was also from Germany and came to America, at the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr, at about the same time he did (the Tillichs arrived in 1933). Also, Tillich took a great interest in and wrote about art, including essays on Matthias Grünewald and Picasso’s Guernica. He was interested in the Christian aspect of German Expressionism, especially Peter’s favorite, Max Beckmann. In short, Tillich was a highly respected intellectual who advocated the kind of art, generally figurative, that made up the New Images of Man.
Peter called Tillich at home in New York and invited him to write about the show from an existentialist perspective. Tillich agreed, and there began a long personal and professional association. Peter recalls a dinner with the Tillichs and the Filipino American artist Alfonso Ossorio at the Selzes’ rented summer house on Long Island. Ossorio, a devout Roman Catholic, is noted for the Christian iconography that persisted even as his work became more abstract under the influence of his Long Island neighbor Jackson Pollock, whom Peter greatly admired. The fact that Ossorio sought out Dubuffet in France only reinforced a camaraderie of taste and interest. This community of aesthetic humanist artists and thinkers doubtless provided support for Peter’s basic nonformalist approach at MoMA. And the religious component—perhaps better described as subjective, emotional, and mystical—played a part in that broader artistic vision.
At any rate, the prefatory note in the New Images catalogue, with its eloquent positioning of art within the larger context of the human condition, leaves no doubt as to why Peter Selz chose Paul Tillich. And since it states so completely Peter’s own view, it is worth quoting here:
Each period has its peculiar image of man. It appears in its poems and novels, music, philosophy, plays and dances; and it appears in its painting and sculpture. Whenever a new period is conceived in the womb of the preceding period, a new image of man pushes towards the surface and finally breaks through to find its artists and philosophers. We have been living for decades at a turning point, and nothing is more indicative of this fact than the revolutionary styles in the visual arts which have followed each other since the beginning of our century. Each of these styles transformed the image of man drastically, even when compared to the changes of the past five centuries. Where are the organic forms of man’s body, the human character of his face, the uniqueness of his individual person? And finally, when in abstract or NonObjective painting and sculpture, the figure disappears completely, one is tempted to ask, what has happened to man? This is the question which we direct at our contemporary artists, and in this question one can discern an undertone of embarrassment, of anger and even of hostility against them. Instead, we should ask ourselves, what has become of us? What has happened to the reality of our lives? If we listen to the more profound observers of our period, we hear them speak of the danger in which modern man lives: the danger of losing his humanity and becoming a thing among the things he produces.4
The hostility, even ridicule, that New Images of Man aroused in several critics and even other artists took Selz by surprise.5 The writer of a long Art News review—evidently hostile to formulaic latter-day Abstract Expressionism—entirely missed the point, setting up abstraction and figuration as irreconcilably antithetical, either/or stylistic phenomena, the opposite of Selz’s inclusive and flexible modernist view. The New York provincialism to which he so vigorously objected is also evident in the reviewer’s condescending regional put-downs: “‘New Images’ has a moderately entertaining effect, thanks to the talent scout mentality
which has filled the center of the show with blooming starlets from far-away stops on the Golden State Limited. The most stunningly slick painting is oozed onto canvas by Nathan Oliveira [illustrated: Seated Man with Object, 1957], a fast shuffle artist whose . . . spatial adventuring . . . and great attention to the small, fractional movements in the rugged outcoasts of forms have long been clichés in San Francisco abstraction.”6 And so on. In general, this particular critic, Manny Farber, treated the Europeans better than the Californians (with his backhanded reference to “stops on the Golden State Limited”) and Chicagoans such as Peter’s friend Leon Golub.7 It is no small irony that Farber ultimately spent a big chunk of his distinguished career as an admired film critic and painter in California.
In reading other prominent critics, it appears that Peter may have exaggerated the proportion of negativity. For the few scathing reviews, more display a willingness to look closely and provide intellectual (if not always aesthetic) justifications for images that were frequently described as unsettling and disturbing. The view of “man” as presented in the exhibition was not seen as a positive one, but it was generally taken seriously. For example, even conservative John Canaday in the New York Times offered what might be called qualified praise—stingy, but hardly the negative response his conservative reputation would lead one to expect: “In spite of questions of selection, this is an important exhibition. As it sets out to do, it demonstrates that the cultivation of expressive imagery by artists who have seemed isolated from one another has been a pervasive constant in contemporary painting and sculpture. If it means to say further, by implication, that this constant is the white hope of art at the moment—then Hear! Hear!”8
Greater insight and understanding of the deeper implications of the show’s theme were brought to the subject by two distinguished critics, Aline B. Saarinen, also writing in the New York Times, and Katherine Kuh, newly appointed art critic for Saturday Review. Saarinen’s article was especially attentive to and descriptive of what she viewed as the horrific quality of much of the imagery—“human figures with bodies distorted, misshapen, mutilated, flesh decayed and corrupt, corroded or charred”—to which she devoted an entire paragraph:
Is this some freak show of horrors inspired by a sadistic impulse on the part of Peter Selz, the director of the exhibition? Is this mere Grand Guignol? Has the exhibition been put on by the Museum of Modern Art with no more significant intention than that of a movie theatre displaying a “chiller” in order to boost attendance? Unquestionably, some of the public will answer these questions with impassioned affirmatives. But others will recognize that this exhibition is concerned with the human predicament, with the troubled states of the soul in our time. They will understand that it is disquieting and unsettling precisely because it ruthlessly invades our inner privacy and inexorably lays bare modern man’s fears and anxieties, his bestiality and his loneliness.9
Earlier in her piece, Saarinen states that the main issues in the “debate” she anticipates will be provoked by the show are not aesthetic but rather center on the questions of “premise and justification.” And she also recognizes the implied confrontation between expressive figuration and Abstract Expressionism (something that Selz in his catalogue introduction denied was intended),10 cautioning that the yearning of “New Humanists” for “a return to the ideal or naturalist figure” will find cold comfort here. “Such dreamers had best remain with abstract expressionism, which they can smugly and comfortably misunderstand as mere decoration.”11 In this observation Saarinen seems entirely in step with Selz and his stated disinterest in challenging anything but the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. Both critic and curator seem to share the opinion that the recognizable human presence was desirable, perhaps essential, to make certain important points about the condition of contemporary men and women.
Katherine Kuh was thoughtfully critical of the exhibition, pointing out where the claims of the exhibition were not always evident from the work on view. She rightly cited German Expressionism as a major source and pointed out that “despite their arresting vigor, these artists as yet have not produced a language appreciably different from their predecessors’.” Recognizing the source of “disturbing images of man in Grünewald, Bosch, and Goya,” Kuh acknowledged that these great painters differed from modern-day artists in that they were “less concerned with the merging of form and content”:
This unique contribution of the twentieth century is particularly well demonstrated in the current exhibition, where artists depend on appropriately pitted surfaces, discarded materialism and gashed pigment to describe the decay and destruction. This very union of meaning and means may well prove to be the new realism of our time. . . . There are those who will be shocked by the brutality of the exhibition, but for me it remains curiously romantic and moral: romantic in its zeal for personal expression, moral in its concentration on the evils of our time. Anger here is so strong as to become an ethical judgment.12
How could one wish for a better appreciation of curatorial intent? It is puzzling, not to mention out of character, that Selz selectively remembers only the negative response to his first great exhibition. Both of these reviews, especially Katherine Kuh’s, grasp in one way or another just what Selz was after. And they provide an entry into an exhibition that was, certainly in retrospect, as morally honest as anything else of its time. Figuration versus abstraction was not the issue. It was a moral and ethical need that brought the show together.
Remarkably, the critical controversy surrounding the show and its reception, compounded by limited understanding of Selz’s goals, endures to the present day. Peter recently felt compelled to take to task critic Peter Schjeldahl for his characterization of New Images in a New Yorker review of Leon Golub’s late drawings.13 In a letter to Schjeldahl, he wrote: “It is dead wrong to call the exhibition at MoMA a ‘flop.’ As I understand it, ‘flop’ refers to minute attendance and I wonder if you checked the attendance records. To my recollection, it brought a very large number of visitors to 53rd Street, partly because of the controversy which it aroused.” Selz went on: “Alfred Barr congratulated me on this, my first exhibition at MoMA, saying that controversial exhibitions and acquisitions were the lifeblood of the Museum.” The irate Peter Selz concluded his letter with an observation that goes back to the contemporary worldview that the art seemed to reflect: “It is totally absurd to write that ‘only Golub of the young artists survived without despair.’ What the hell does that mean? Among the younger artists were Karel Appel, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Eduardo Paolozzi, H. C. Westermann, as well as Leon Golub. It seems clear, Mr. Schjeldahl, that they managed to survive without despair.”14
The second show with which Peter was closely associated after joining the MoMA staff, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, attracted as much attention as did New Images of Man. Peter was stepping into dangerous water when he decided to pursue this event. Tinguely had visited New York for the first time in January 1960. According to one account, on the flight he sketched ideas for a work that would express his feelings about the idea of New York: “I thought how nice it would be to make a little machine there that would be conceived, like Chinese fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom.” It would be a machine called “Homage to New York, and its sole raison d’être would be to destroy itself in one act of glorious mechanical freedom. . . . He decided at once that the only proper locale for the event was the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and as soon as he landed he set about achieving this almost impossible objective.”15 Even with only partial information, collections curator Dorothy Miller had been suspicious of what Tinguely planned and had turned down his proposal. As Selz recalled, “Dorothy Miller said, ‘No, our job at the museum is to preserve, not destroy, works of art.’ So then Dore [Ashton] talked to me; Tinguely talked to me. Tinguely said it was fine [what Miller said], but that applies to acquisitions. And this was an exhibition, not an acquisition.”16
Although Peter assi
gned Miller, the first woman to occupy a responsible curatorial position at MoMA, exclusively to the collections side of museum operations, she had been involved for years (hired in 1934) as Barr’s main associate in planning exhibitions. Since 1941 she had been in charge of a series devoted to introducing young artists supposedly associated with new trends. Among these shows, two were of particular note: Twelve Americans (1952) and Sixteen Americans (1959), the latter on view the year of Peter’s New Images. But rather than representing the leading edge of art trends, according to intellectual historian Richard Cándida Smith, “neither Miller nor the Museum of Modern Art had been at the forefront of exhibiting new developments in the visual arts.”17 For example, Sixteen Americans gave the museum’s blessing to Abstract Expressionism at a time when it was already being discussed in the past tense. And in 1936, Miller’s New Horizons in American Art included a large sampling of Works Progress Administration (WPA) art, much of it of indifferent quality—especially when compared to French painting, as even her boss, Alfred Barr, noted with exasperation.18
Peter, new on the job but committed to modernist innovation, was willing to take a chance on Tinguely, whose work he admired. In this, he was encouraged by his friend Dore Ashton and by the former Berlin Dadaist-turned-psychiatrist Richard Huelsenbeck. Peter understood that the destruction was the point, and he took the request to d’Harnoncourt, who approved the project. According to Selz, René believed MoMA should take chances. Peter further remembers Tinguely’s reasoning behind his self-destructing sculpture: “Tinguely told me, ‘No matter how you try to conserve and preserve, it will be gone anyhow. It’s just a matter of time.’ His whole idea was that art like life is in flux, and he emphasized that flux. Simply put, destroy the structure of art and the [inevitable] process is quicker. Tinguely [also] wanted the white-painted junk sculpture to be beautiful, so people would be dismayed. I had no idea how beautiful it would be.”19
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