9. Philip Johnson, Memorial Service for Alfred Barr (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), unpaginated; quoted in Kantor, Alfred H. Barr Jr., 365.
10. MoMA (Zane), 31.
11. Ibid., 32–33. Peter’s account of bringing William Seitz from Princeton to MoMA for the Monet exhibition conflicts with that of Barr’s biographer Marquis, who states that “in 1960, Barr brought Seitz as a curator to MoMA” (Alfred Barr Jr., 262). Selz confirmed his version in a phone conversation (2 April 2010), however, reiterating that the selection of Seitz as his associate was his, seconded by Barr, and then effected, despite the director’s reservations, by René d’Harnoncourt. It was, after all, Peter’s department and presumably his decision.
12. MoMA (Zane), 36. Having interviewed many former staff members, interviewer Sharon Zane was well versed in the inside stories as well as the public programs and exhibitions of MoMA. She did a good job in teasing out of Selz and her other in-house subjects details and anecdotes about the eccentric (some have suggested dysfunctional) aspects of the museum’s operation.
13. Author phone conversation with Selz, 2 April 2010. That view of Malraux’s motives is supported by Porter McCray in an oral history interview with Paul Cummings, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 17 September–4 October 1977 (www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-porter-mccray-12974); hereafter McCray interview, AAA. This account was considered important enough to be mentioned in John Russell’s obituary for McCray in the New York Times, 10 December 2000.
14. McCray interview, AAA.
15. Author phone conversation with Selz, 2 April 2010.
16. MoMA (Zane), 34.
17. Ibid., 36–37.
18. Ibid., 37–38.
19. AAA 1982, 31.
20. Ibid., 38.
21. Ibid., 39–40.
22. Ibid., 40–41.
23. ibid., 41.
24. Ibid., 41–42.
25. McCray interview, AAA.
26. AAA 1982, 42. Selz’s use of the word triumph in connection with the New York School of painting is a slightly ironic nod to the popular idea of Abstract Expressionist supremacy, as expressed in Irving Sandler’s influential study The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970). This markedly chauvinistic assumption was challenged by Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
27. Selz in phone conversation with author, 3 March 2009.
28. Selz was then, as he is now, sensitive to the resistance shown by the still insular New York art establishment to major talents such as Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, both largely ignored, if not dismissed out of hand, because they were working outside New York City (though they did exhibit there). It amounted almost to professional suicide to insist on plying the artist’s trade in regional backwaters such as the Pacific Northwest. The major critics, among them Clement Greenberg and Irving Sandler, sustained that prejudicial view of Tobey’s work, despite his being mentioned as a source for Jackson Pollock’s “all over” imagery and “drip” technique. Pollock in fact admired Tobey, with whom he exhibited in two 1944 group shows. In a letter (undated, postmark 5 January 1946) to Portland artist Louis Bunce (the two met at the Art Students League in the 1930s when Bunce and Willem de Kooning were studio assistants of Arshile Gorky), Pollock wrote: “New York seems to be the only place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru. Tobey and Graves seem to be an exception.” And in a different letter: “Do you ever see Tobey or Graves? I still like their work a lot.” Quoted in Paul J. Karlstrom, “Jackson Pollock and Louis Bunce,” Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 2 (1984): 26.
29. AAA 1982, 43.
30. Ibid., 43–44.
31. Ibid., 44.
32. The “pan” review to which Selz refers is no doubt the unsigned “New Images of (Ugh) Man” that appeared in Art News 58, no. 6 (October 1959): 38– 39, 58. While crediting Selz and the museum for being involved in “something more important than a genial contemporaneity” by mounting “a protest against the Abstract Expressionists,” the writer (Manny Farber)—apparently no longer a fan of Abstract Expressionism—takes Selz to task for including Pollock and de Kooning, thereby rendering the whole intent of the show “ridiculous.”
33. AAA 1982, 32–33.
34. Memoir 9 (7 January 2009), 30.
35. Memoir 8 (4 August 2008), 1–5.
36. Ibid., 6.
37. Thomas B. Hess, “Editorial: Notes on American Museums,” Art News 65, no. 7 (November 1966): 27.
38. Memoir 3, 42–43.
39. Author interview with Dore Ashton, New York, 16 February 2007, 10–11; hereafter Ashton interview.
40. Author interview with Marianne Hinckle, San Francisco, 1 August 2008, 8–9; hereafter Hinckle interview. Hinckle was close to the famous Ramparts journalist Hunter E. Thompson and interviewed Eldridge Cleaver, among other Bay Area “radicals,” when she was in her twenties. Historian Kevin Starr told her she was “more political” than her brother, Warren (Hinckle interview, 15). From the beginning, politics—“civil rights and the antiwar thing”—were an important connection with Peter.
41. Hinckle interview, 7. Art historian Hans Maria Wingler was author of a book on Oskar Kokoschka as well as several books on the Bauhaus, among them Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1969).
42. Hinckle interview, 20.
43. Ibid.
44. Memoir 9, 37–38.
45. Ibid., 39.
46. Ibid.
5. MOMA EXHIBITIONS
1. Telephone conversation and typed note from Selz, 27 January 2009.
2. AAA 1982, 32–34.
3. Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was a leading Protestant theologian best known for his “methodology of correlation,” a synthesis of Christian revelation with existential philosophy. Born in Brandenburg Province, Germany, he emigrated with his family—and with the encouragement of Reinhold Niebuhr—to the United States to accept a professorship (1933–55) at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. In 1955 he went to Harvard Divinity School and in 1962 to the University of Chicago, Peter Selz’s alma mater.
4. Paul Tillich, “A Prefatory Note by Paul Tillich,” in Selz, New Images of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 9.
5. According to Jed Perl, many artists objected to New Images of Man because the artists included “failed to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.” Giacometti was the exception. See Perl, New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 503. Realist Fairfield Porter wrote a scathing review in The Nation: “The common superficial look of the exhibition is that it collects monsters of mutilation, death, and decay” (reprinted in Porter, Art in Its Own Terms, ed. Rackstraw Downes [New York: Taplinger, 1979], 59). Many reviews echoed this charge.
6. [Manny Farber,] Art News 58, no. 6 (October 1959): 39. In fairness to the New York critics, there were more positive reviews of New Images of Man than Selz remembers. Although it is true that much of the imagery was generally described as grotesque and horrific, and that the show could be seen as a challenge to Abstract Expressionism, some critics were willing to consider the stated objectives of the exhibition as articulated by Selz. Among the more sympathetic critics were Emily Genauer (of whom Selz was not a fan), Dore Ashton, Katherine Kuh, and even John Canaday in the New York Times. Certainly not all critics, as Selz has it, were upset by or hostile to New Images of Man.
7. For Farber, see also chap. 4, n. 32.
8. John Canaday, “New Images of Man: Important Show Opens at Modern Museum,” New York Times, 30 September 1959.
9. Aline B. Saarinen, “‘New Images of Man’—Are They?” New York Times Magazine, 27 September 1959, 18–19.
10. Selz, New Images of Man, 12.
11. Saarinen, “‘New Images of Man,’” 18.
12. Katherine Kuh, “Disturbing Are These ‘New Images of Man,’ ” Saturday Re
view, 24 October 1954, 48–49. Coincidentally, Kuh succeeded James Thrall Soby, a trustee who performed as acting director prior to René d’Harnoncourt.
13. Peter Schjeldahl, “Beasts: Leon Golub’s Stubborn Humanism,” New Yorker, 17 May 2010, 116–17. The sentences that set Selz off actually recall the terms of the realist/abstraction divide and the outside–New York “loyalty to humanist strains in modern art . . . against the grain of American high art after Abstract Expressionism. A postwar fashion for humanist styles expired in a famous flop of an exhibition . . . which perhaps only Golub, of the younger artists included, survived without despair” (ibid., 117).
14. Letter from Peter Selz to Peter Schjeldahl, 18 May 2010 (copied to editor David Remnick), Peter Selz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
15. Jean Tinguely, quoted in D. Hall and P. Wykes, Anecdotes of Modern Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 350.
16. Selz video interview conducted by the author for the British artist Michael Landy’s H2NY, a documentary on Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960). The interview was recorded by videographer/documentarian Douglas Weihnacht at Selz’s Berkeley home on 12 December 2007.
17. Richard Cándida Smith, The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 110. Cándida Smith acknowledges, however, that “given the artists invited to appear [including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella] . . . Sixteen Americans seems to have predicted with remarkable accuracy the ruptures about to tear apart modern art in the United States” (ibid.).
18. See Marquis, Alfred H. Barr Jr., 139–49. Miller was married to Holger Cahill, head of the WPA art programs. There were rumors of an intimate relationship with Barr, which in a 1986 interview she dismissed, saying: “It’s not anybody’s business. Lots of women were in love with Alfred” (quoted ibid., 141).
19. Video interview of Peter Selz about Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, conducted by the author, 14 December 2007.
20. AAA 1982, 34–36.
21. Memoir 8, 8.
22. John Canaday, “Machine Tries to Die for Its Art,” New York Times, 18 March 1960.
23. AAA 1982, 36.
24. K. G. Hultén in handout for Tinguely, Homage to New York: A self-constructing and self-destroying work of art conceived and built by Jean Tinguely, Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, 17 March 1960, 6:30–7:00 P.M. Hultén, later known professionally as Pontus Hultén, was a Swedish collector and respected international museum director. At the time of the Tinguely event at MoMA he was the newly appointed director of the Moderna Museet (Stockholm); he was also founding director (1973–80) of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and from 1980 to 1984 he was in Los Angeles as founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The California connection reinforced his friendship with Sam Francis and added, among younger L.A. artists, conceptualist Greg Colson. Hultén is author of Tinguely: “Méta” (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975) and Jean Tinguely: A Magic Stronger than Death (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987).
25. Peter Selz, “Acknowledgments,” in Art Nouveau: Art and Design at the Turn of the Century, ed. Peter Selz and Mildred Constantine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1960, © 1959), 6.
26. AAA 1982, 36.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 37.
29. Selz, “Painting and Sculpture, Prints and Drawings,” in Art Nouveau, 55. The Gauguin painting on wood was alternately attributed to the School of Pont-Aven. Selz’s essay illustrates Bonnard’s Le Peignoir (ca. 1892) and the color lithograph Screen (published in 1899).
30. Selz, introduction to Art Nouveau, 12.
31. Ibid., 17.
32. Meyer Schapiro, “The Armory Show” (1950), in Modernist Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 152.
33. Memoir 5 (10 March 2008), 22–23.
34. Emily Genauer, “Art: They’re All Busy Drawing Blanks,” New York Herald Tribune, 22 January 1961.
35. Peter Selz in Rothko (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 12–14. This paragraph, an attempt to suggest depth of feeling in universal terms, stands out in, and somehow apart from, the rest of the essay. Perhaps more than any other art phenomenon, certainly more than the color-field painting with which Rothko is identified, Symbolism provides a more enlightening context for his work. The rest of the essay is written in Selz’s straightforward descriptive style, one that he graciously acknowledges benefits from his editors.
36. John Canaday, “Is Less More, and When for Whom? Rothko Show Raises Questions About Painters, Critics and Audience,” New York Times, 22 January 1961.
37. For a recent look at how the unregulated commercial (fine) art market impacts artists and their interdependent relationship with critics and curators, see Holland Cotter, “The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!” New York Times, 12 February 2009.
38. MoMA (Zane), 44–45.
39. Peter Selz, introduction to Directions in Kinetic Sculpture (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1966), 6.
40. Ibid., 5.
41. Memoir 8, 7.
42. Conversation with Peter Selz, San Francisco, 24 May 2010. Selz was adamant on this distinction between the two terms (French and English).
43. Canaday quoting Jean Dubuffet in “Is Less More?”
44. Wylie Sypher in Loss of the Self (1962), quoted by Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World: Primitive à la Mode,” New Yorker, 26 October 1968, 145.
45. Rosenberg, ibid., quoting Selz in The Work of Jean Dubuffet (Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 43.
46. MoMA (Zane), 78–79.
47. This feud and the dinner exchange that brought it out into the open are documented in increasingly hostile letters between the two men written between 6 September and 29 October 1980 (located in the 2010 installment of the Peter Selz Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). “I was surprised to say the least,” wrote Elsen on 5 October, “when the other night at a dinner table in front of strangers you complained that you had been hearing that the 1963 MoMA Rodin exhibition was my show. . . . When I pointed out that I had picked the show, you looked as if you wished to challenge that fact. So challenge it now, in writing.” Selz responded on 29 October in a conciliatory but unyielding manner: “I am sorry if I embarrassed you by discussing this matter at our dinner at the Swigs, but I don’t think that anyone actually overheard our rather private discussion.” In fact, the discussion was not in front of strangers, as I was there along with prominent collector and art dealer Rena Bransten and, as I recall, Helen Lundeberg, the guest of honor. And, whatever the merits on either side of the argument, it was indeed overheard by the entire table. Peter rests his case on the acknowledgment of Elsen’s role in the exhibition brochure: “I want to express my special thanks to Professor Albert E. Elsen of Indiana University not only for his authorship of the book on Rodin which the Museum is publishing in connection with this exhibition, but also for his essential advice and assistance through the preparation of the exhibition.” The acknowledgments were signed: “Peter Selz, Director of the Exhibition.”
48. Max Beckmann opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1 October 1964, before moving to MoMA for a December 14 opening and then on to Chicago, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and London.
49. Quoted in Selz, Max Beckmann (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 55. Alfred Barr’s tribute to Beckmann appeared on the label for the triptych during its special memorial exhibition at MoMA.
50. Selz, Beckmann, 61.
51. Quoted in Selz, Beckmann, 58.
52. Ibid.
53. Libby Tannenbaum, “Beckmann: St. Louis Adopts the International Expressionist,” Art News 47, no. 3 (May 1948): 21.
54. Selz, Beckmann, 91–92.
55. Max Beckmann, “Letters to a Woman Painter,” ibid., appendix, 132–34. Translated by Mathilde Q. Beckmann and Perry T. Rathbone, the letters were read aloud by Mrs. Beckmann at Stephens College on 3 Februar
y 1948. Subsequently they were read at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; over the radio in St. Louis during the 1948 Beckmann retrospective; at the Art School of the University of Colorado, Boulder; and at Mills College, Oakland, California. They were published in the College Art Journal 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1949): 39–43.
56. Perry Rathbone, “Max Beckmann in America: A Personal Reminiscence,” in Selz, Beckmann, 125.
57. Ibid., 127.
58. MoMA (Zane), 80–81.
59. Selz, in Alberto Giacometti (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 7.
60. Ibid., 11.
6. POP GOES THE ART WORLD
1. Louise Bruner, “High Priest of Modern Art Speaks Nonobjectively,” The Blade [Detroit], 11 December 1960. According to the article, two hundred people attended at a ticket price of $15 per person and $20 per couple, a fairly stiff admission fee for the time. Peter Selz was an art world celebrity. The sampling of thoughtful questions that were featured in the article indicate that at least some among the audience were informed about art and museum issues. One person asked, “Since critics and museums in the past have been mistaken about the art of their times, why do you feel your taste in today’s art is valid?” Selz’s response was to the point: “We aren’t secure; we only try to avoid pre-established theories of what art should be.”
2. The changing role of MoMA as the exclusive arbiter of taste in terms of modern and contemporary art was much discussed by critics at the time. This issue seems to have come to a head first in the museum’s delayed response to Abstract Expressionism and then a decade later in its lukewarm reception of Pop when it exploded on the scene. See the proceedings of MoMA’s A Symposium on Pop Art (13 December 1963), organized and moderated by Peter Selz, in Steven Henry Madoff, ed., Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65–81. Especially relevant to MoMA’s responsibility to introduce new art is the symposium exchange between Hilton Kramer and Leo Steinberg. Kramer introduced the subject with a comment directed to Steinberg: “I think, Leo, that you are completely ignoring the role that the Museum plays in creating history as well as reflecting it. It is its responsibility as a factor in determining the course of what art is created that people are objecting to.” Steinberg responded: “Of course the Museum has a role to play in making history . . . but there is a balance of power. The Museum is not alone” (ibid., 77).
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