Driving north in my little Fiat, we stopped in Arezzo, as I wanted him to see the Piero della Francesco murals in the church of San Francesco. He did not respond to the Renaissance painter’s early mastery of aerial and linear perspective or the modeling of his figures. He found [Fra Angelico’s] Legend of the True Cross too narrative. At the monastery of San Marco in Florence, however, he admired the small frescoes in the monks’ cells, especially for the intimacy of the setting in each cell where the monks would be confronted by the painted images at all times.6
Norma remembered the trip differently.7 For example, she insisted that Rothko did not particularly like Peter, and that indeed it was she who was his friend—though she didn’t explain exactly what she meant by that. But her description of her ongoing relationship with Rothko, after leaving Peter and returning to New York, is enlightening in several respects.
We went to Italy in the summer of 1965, I think [in fact it was 1966], and joined up with Mark, Mell, and Kate [the Rothkos’ daughter]—can’t remember if Christopher [Rothko] was there. The Rothkos stayed with [art dealer] Carla Panicali; we stayed in a hotel, but we spent a lot of time with them. After I came back to New York after I divorced [Norma’s emphasis] Peter, I was extremely close to Mark. No, I was not his lover. But we loved each other, and I wrote a whole story about it. . . . I knew that Mark was not fond of Peter on a personal level. In addition to which Mark had a distrust of museum curators in general, which was not unusual among the New York school of painters at that time. We took the red painting [given to them both by Rothko] with us to Berkeley and hung it [in the] living room of our home in the Berkeley hills. After two and a half years I left the painting with Peter, divorced him, and moved back to New York in 1967.8
Rothko’s alleged low opinion of Peter notwithstanding, he showed up in California the following year through Selz’s arrangement. Peter recounts: “A year later I was able to persuade Mark to accept a Regent’s Professorship for the summer at Berkeley, which required no teaching and provided free time for painting in the Bay Area—where almost twenty years earlier he had begun the paintings which we now call his classic style. We spent a good deal of time together that summer. Critic Brian O’Doherty and art historian Barbara Novak were also at Berkeley at that time, and the discussions between the artist, art historians, and critic were lively and provocative. I wish we had recorded them.”9
Alongside these pleasant social breaks, however, were the ongoing funding difficulties. According to Selz, Clark Kerr never did get along with the legislature, so Kerr had to come up with another idea and said: “Let’s do this museum with no connection to state funds. It [will be] funded out of student fees, and the students are going to love this.”10
One innovation that Peter arrived at to bolster student involvement was the Pacific Film Archive. In 1966 a young film scholar from New York, Sheldon Renan, arrived in Berkeley with the idea of creating a film archive in a museum in the area. Although interest in avantgarde and independent film was evident throughout the Bay Area, Renan met resistance at both the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum. Peter Selz, in contrast, was interested. Selz says he believed that film was probably the most important art expression of the time, and, taking his cue from the program at MoMA (a Barr innovation implemented by British film critic Iris Barry) and Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, he established film as a separate department of the Berkeley museum.11
In many respects now acknowledged as the central jewel in the Berkeley museum crown and recognized worldwide for its active collecting and preservation program, PFA initially had a difficult time establishing itself and securing even minimal support for its innovative programs. In fact, according to Renan and Tom Luddy, a student who worked on the early film programs, despite Selz’s support and ambition to establish a film program to rival MoMA’s, the UC administration was fundamentally hostile to the idea of film as a legitimate component of an art museum. Peter had great enthusiasm for the idea, and “the late 1960s was certainly the time for an individual with a passion to act first—just do it—and think about the details (and the funding) later. This is exactly how the Pacific Film Archive came into being.” But he had neglected to follow procedure. The administration’s response was something of a rebuke: “As the Archive’s existence was quite unofficial as far as the university was concerned, the year’s budget, $800, was appropriated from the art museum’s publication allocation.” Founder Renan, who was made director of the PFA in 1967, described the situation in a 1971 interview: “This whole thing is put together with spit, chewing gum, good intentions, cooperation from the film community, and overhead paid by the Museum. I’m not over-budget or under-budget because I haven’t got a budget.”12 In a 2010 e-mail, Renan had more to say about the struggle to realize his personal dream of a true film archive. He begins by acknowledging the supportive role of Peter Selz: “History seems to be treating Peter too harshly. Accomplishing great things done is rarely achieved by perfect people and philosopher kings. Juicy excess and painful hubris are usually required. Neither the Berkeley Museum nor the Pacific Film Archive could have been as successful as they became without the counter-intuitive virtues resulting from the out-of-balance and slightly dysfunctional teams that started both. They were essentially separate endeavors, but each nevertheless relied on the other.”13
Tom Luddy, who in 1972 returned from working in New York to succeed Renan as director, was more forceful in his denunciation of the treatment PFA and Peter Selz received from the administration: “We were recognized around the world, except [by the administration] in Sproul Hall. The university savagely opposed the film program and punished Selz for setting it up without authorization.”14 Luddy and Renan both moved on to successful careers as consultants, and Luddy became co-founder and is the current director of the Telluride Film Festival (2011 having been its 38th season). Neither of these men, important contributors to creating and developing a world-class film program at Berkeley, has anything positive to say about the university’s treatment of PFA and UAM. But Renan gives Peter high points as a “great talent scout.” Selz describes the PFA as one of his most important accomplishments—second only to building the collection—as director of the museum. And it proved to have the student appeal that he had hoped for. In the beginning, at least, Kerr’s student funding strategy was a success.
When he arrived in California, Selz recognized immediately that art trends were quite different from those in New York. Indeed, he was one of the first East Coast observers of contemporary art to recognize this difference, a difference that is now an accepted fact of American cultural history.15 His opening show at the Powerhouse Gallery at Berkeley was Directions in Kinetic Sculpture (1966). It had been planned for MoMA, “so I had all my research done when I came out here and simply transferred it from the Museum of Modern Art to the Berkeley museum, and that really started the thing, literally, with a loud bang.”16 The exhibition was a great success, with attendance in the first month alone numbering sixty thousand. That pleased the university’s public relations department, which had been reeling from the bad press generated by the Free Speech Movement.
Impressive shows followed, one after another, establishing a distinctive identity for the museum even before the new building was dedicated. Kinetic Sculpture was followed by an exhibition of the Surrealist work of René Magritte and the first American show of Jules Pascin’s work, both of which Selz brought with him from New York. Selz’s assistant, Tom Freudenheim, curated the Pascin show, which went directly on national tour. But the most memorable exhibition, especially in terms of California art history, was Funk. As Peter recalled, “In 1967 we followed the great success of the kinetic art show with another popular one, Funk art, which was very local . . . growing out of two artists whom I found of particular interest: Peter Voulkos on the one extreme and Bruce Conner on the other. These artists all were doing art of a certain kind which was very different from what was going on any
where else in the country.”17
In fact, the course Selz was charting at Berkeley, reflecting his quick study and adoption of a specifically Californian social and cultural situation, was innovative, even subversive—far more so than the University Art Museum itself, which had a reputation as being “elitist.” The new director described Funk, as it was presented at the Powerhouse, as a “hot, involved, biological, sensual, sexual, erotic kind of art.”18 Taking his adjectives to heart, Selz soon was seen largely in the company of artists, learning to live the California art life (see Fig. 18).
• • •
Five years after Selz’s arrival in Berkeley, in November 1970, the new University Art Museum at last opened, with considerable fanfare and an exhibition, Excellence: Art from the University Community, that consisted of six hundred works of art from antiquity to the present. Drawn from the collections of regents, alumni, and others connected to the university— including two of California’s preeminent collectors, Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty—the exhibition did double duty as a wish list for future gifts. This “elitist institution’s” new home, with its show of artworks representing the wealth and power of California, opened at the height of the student antiwar movement. But the students were able to separate art from the university administration they were battling; they “came in flocks and loved it.” The new museum on the Berkeley campus, funded by student fees, had “total support.”19
The opening exhibition at the new museum represented the high-end collecting establishment, hardly the avantgarde to which Selz was by this time personally attracted. However, a proposal from avantgarde dancer Anna Halprin established, albeit inadvertently, a point of view and direction that pushed the museum right into the Bay Area counterculture (see Fig. 19).
Prior to the three-day grand opening celebration, Halprin offered to have her dancers “wash” and “soften” the concrete ramps, overlooks, and galleries with body movement. Selz readily agreed, but without ever having seen Halprin’s work. According to Selz, curator Brenda Richardson cautioned that this could create some problems with the administration:
“‘Do you know,’ she asked, ‘that Anna’s dancers are generally nude?’”
“‘No, I didn’t,’ I responded. ‘But what can I do? I can’t withdraw my acceptance of her offer at this point. And I don’t want to censor her art.’”
So the evening went forward, with a limited group of people there by selective invitation. By all accounts, they loved this demonstration of the new museum’s “spirit.” “The performance was a feast for the eye,” Selz recalls, with “beautiful naked young men and women flowing throughout the museum. Soft flesh against hard gray concrete.”20
The museum could not have received a more appropriate California-style launching. The Halprin event was actually one of several launching the grand opening. At one, minimalist composer Steve Reich performed late into the night. Selz had met Reich, at that time not well known, in New York and invited him. The program also had happenings created by Robert Hudson and William Wiley, who found in it a role for the museum’s new director. Wiley recently described the event in colorful detail in an idiosyncratic handwritten account:
At the opening of the Berkeley Museum when I and Robert Hudson and Jim Melchert, Pete Volkus, Richard Shaw, Brenda Richardson, Bonnie Sherk, Steve Reich, and Carl Dern and Peter Selz—along with many others presented our event the “Impossible Dream” and just before the finale—Peter standing at the swinging doors—me handing him a black cowboy hat with white trim—and strapping on a couple of guns and holsters and telling him to walk to the bar draw his guns and tell the bartender—give me some art!!
Just before Peter pushes through them swingin doors the other afore named involved made a path—from louvered doors to bar—saying— Peter’s coming! Peter’s coming!! Peter strode forward hat cocked low right up to the bar where Carl Dern waited quivering in fear. Drawing his gun on reaching the bar—Peter said give me some art!! Carl from below the bar brought up an enormous flat—shot glass—with a decaled shop through it—it was wide and an inch or so thick. He proceeded to empty a fifth of 90% proof A.M.S. corn whiskey into the large flat plastic shop glass—Peter holstered his guns and raised the whiskey to his lips—
At that point with Melchert at the piano—all the dance hall girls wear up on the card tables—with song cards and the players and the audience sang—The Impossible Dream.21
In addition, there were poetry readings by Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Richard Brautigan. It was, according to curator Lucinda Barnes, a “multidisciplinary contemporary art extravaganza heralding a radical new building and an ambitious cultural enterprise, which within a matter of months would also include the Pacific Film Archive.”22
Over the course of the three days, Steve Reich did several impromptu pieces; artist Norton Wisdom recalls one vividly. In his recollection, he was one of a dozen students seated on the concrete floor of the main gallery. There was no announcement of the event; somehow the word spread and a few curious individuals showed up to see what was going on. Reich incorporated them into the performance, clustering them together with half a dozen reel-to-reel tape decks placed around them. One long tape snaked through the Sony decks, producing competing but related musical passages. Wisdom remembers that it was beautiful, and it stirred his newfound interest in performance art and music, which became, years later, central elements in his mature art.23
The move from New York to “laid-back” California put Peter in touch with a counterculture that seemed organic and natural to the place rather than invented or imposed. It provided the context for him to realize the full liberation he had sought earlier and that in a fundamental way represented his authentic personal identity. Aligning himself with artists and their natural readiness to step outside the rules of art and society, Selz still likes to think of himself as a sympathetic mediator between artists and the essential institutions—museums, universities—that serve them, or should do so. Each of his books and exhibitions was based on the idea that the creative individual, the artist, was at the center of the whole cultural enterprise, not the scholar or the curator. Peter places himself in the artists’ camp.
• • •
Selz’s exhibition record at Berkeley, whether at the old Powerhouse or in the new Ciampi building, is an impressive one. The kinetic art show, the first with Selz as director, remains the one he generally points to as his most historically significant. Directions in Kinetic Sculpture grew out of Selz’s encounter with the work of Jean Tinguely and most immediately the 1960 installation at MoMA. Selz was fascinated by the introduction of motion and change into art making, with the subject of the sculpture becoming movement itself. And he saw the issues and ideas involved, especially time and change, as fundamental to modernist thinking. In his brief but carefully considered catalogue preface, Selz in effect introduced a new subject and did so by suggesting connections to other manifestations of modernism:
The Constructivists’ point of view was propagated by László Moholy-Nagy who . . . clearly saw into the future and formulated a theory of kinetic art which would not materialize for more than a generation. He advocated the activation of space by means of a dynamic-constructive system of forces and hoped to substitute relationships of energies for the old relationships of form in art. . . . Kinetic sculpture was widely discussed at the Bauhaus and at its offshoot, the Institute of Design in Chicago. There Moholy-Nagy published his influential book, Vision in Motion, in which he postulates that kinetic sculpture is the fifth and last of the successive stages in the development of plastic form.24
Selz also knew Buckminster Fuller from the Chicago years, and he quotes him to establish the scientific relevance of kineticism in art, invoking the triumphant image of Einstein “shattering” the Newtonian cosmos: “Einstein realized that all bodies were constantly being affected by other bodies, and this meant their normal condition was not inertia but continuous motion and continuous change. The replacement of the Newtonian
static norm . . . really opened the way to modern science and technology, and it’s still the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history.”25 One of Selz’s gifts is his ability to syncretize his subjects, whether artists or movements, within a historical context that does not obviate their creative identity outside of that history.
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture featured the work of fourteen sculptors, only four of whom were American, and boasted several “firsts”: it was not only Peter’s first show at Berkeley but also the first show in kinetic sculpture in the United States; it featured the first catalogue essay by kinetic sculptor George Rickey; and it introduced a struggling young San Francisco sculptor, Fletcher Benton, whose career took off thanks to his inclusion in the exhibition. Benton was eager to go on record recalling his fortuitous “discovery” by Selz, at the same time expressing admiration for what Peter contributed in a broader sense to Bay Area art and cultural life:
The word got out that this Museum of Modern Art curator had taken a professorship at Berkeley. And he totally changed, from my point of view, the local atmosphere and the hopes of the artists. . . . So we all felt that this man was a god—that he was going to do great things for the Bay Area. . . . One day I got a phone call: “This is Peter Selz.” And anybody who’s talked to Peter knows he has this deep, impressive baritone voice. He had heard that I was making some moving things, wall pieces. And he asked if he could come by to see them. My first thought was, my god, here’s this incredible museum man coming to my basement studio.
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