27. Author interview with Eleanor Dickinson, San Francisco, 3 January 2008, 19–20; hereafter Dickinson interview. Selz does not acknowledge sexism as a problem at UAM, insisting that he gave full support to women in the museum’s programming. Nonetheless, in Art of Engagement he describes gender discrimination elsewhere: “Artists began to look for women’s art in museums and commercial galleries, finding enormous discrepancies between male and female representation; the ratio of artists being reviewed in Art in America in 1970–71 was twelve males to one female” (190–91).
28. Phone conversation with Peter Selz, 4 August 2010.
29. Conversation during manuscript review meeting with Selz, 6 July 2010. The report on O’Hagan’s refusal to sign the oath appears in the Online Archive of California, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb738nb7fq;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00002&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere.
30. H. W. Janson interviewed by Eleanor Dickinson at the College Art Association annual convention, Washington, D.C., 1 February 1979.
31. Dickinson interview, 17–18.
32. Peter Selz, “San Francisco: Eleanor Dickinson at Hatley Martin,” Art in America, September 1989, 219.
33. Telephone interview with Carole Selz, 31 October 2009.
34. Author interview with Agnes Denes, 15 January 2008, 2; hereafter Denes interview.
35. Peter Selz, “Agnes Denes: The Artist as Universalist,” in Agnes Denes, ed. Jill Hartz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992); reprinted in Selz, Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 240.
36. Ibid., 236.
37. Denes interview, 6 and 7.
38. Ibid., 5 and 6.
39. “Anonymous Was a Woman” is taken from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Denes said, “You look it up on the Web—Anonymous Was a Woman. It’s totally anonymous. But it comes with $25,000, so . . . that’s all you need to know” (Denes interview, 10).
40. Denes interview, 12.
41. Selz, “Agnes Denes,” in Beyond the Mainstream, 240.
42. Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation, trans. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Meridian Books), 85.
43. Selz, “Agnes Denes,” in Beyond the Mainstream, 249.
44. Ashton interview, 2–3, 4.
45. Ibid., 12–14.
46. Ibid., 15.
47. Ibid., 28–29.
48. Ibid., 15.
49. According to Selz’s account, Rothko’s intention regarding distribution of his estate was that the children be provided for but not be made “wealthy.” The Mark Rothko Foundation was established to support older artists, but it was “being pushed aside . . . by the children.” AAA 1982, 73.
50. See Lee Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).
51. Henry Lydiate, “Art After Death,” www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/art-after-death/artists-estates/the-rothko-wrangle.htm.
52. Quoted ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. AAA 1982, 73–76.
55. Ashton interview, 18.
56. Ibid., 17–20.
57. Peter Selz, e-mail to the author, 12 May 2010. The longer account in the AAA 1982 interview is consistent in most details with this recent one. But a key element, the stated purpose of the Rothko Foundation, is surprisingly missing in the latter (see note 49 above).
58. Manuscript review meeting with Selz, 7 July 2010.
59. Author interview with Wayne Andersen, Boston, 17 January 2008, 45; hereafter Andersen interview. Wayne and Dore agree that Peter made a mistake, but they come at agreement from opposite directions. Both know Peter well enough to allow that the fee played a role, but Wayne downplays that: “He got paid $25,000 [actually $20,000]—the word was it built his house in Berkeley.” However, with a somewhat strange ethical logic, Wayne compares that relatively modest amount to the “millions” that Bill Rubin made “off of artists’ gifts” (ibid.).
60. AAA 1982, 75. In the interview, Peter did not limit the “crook” characterization to Frank Lloyd, adding: “But I think that can be said about any dealer, as far as I’ve observed.” In truth, Peter has had cordial and long-standing professional and personal relationships with a number of dealers.
61. Andersen interview, 42–43. This fascinating character study amounts to an indictment of Frank Lloyd that validates Peter’s use of the word crook. David McKee says he did not leave Marlborough because of the Rothko trial (telephone interview, 13 February 2008).
62. Andersen e-mail, “Selz,” 7 December 2009. In our 13 February 2008 telephone interview, David McKee used pretty much the same words in describing Peter’s role.
63. Seldes, Legacy of Mark Rothko, 255.
64. Wayne Andersen, letter to Peter Selz, 11 May 2005. Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine (London: Cambridge University Press, 2004) is a brilliant analysis of a painting at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is also exaggeratedly unconventional, a combination of thoughtful research and extremely personal interpretation.
65. Wayne Andersen, German Artists and Hitler’s Mind: Avantgarde Art in a Turbulent Era (Boston and Geneva: Editions Fabriart, 2007), v.
66. Andersen interview, 3. Andersen’s fundamental irreverence for the field, along with a spectacular ability to conjure up original, almost heretical, art-historical insights, allows him to appreciate the best qualities that Selz brings to his work.
67. Ibid., 25. A few pages later (29), people is substituted for artists, making the important point that Selz is fundamentally a social creature. Art is the point of entry.
68. Wayne Andersen, review of Selz, Art of Engagement, European Legacy 11, no. 3 (2006): 312. In typical manner, Andersen goes beyond the apparent to raise philosophical questions of his own: “Rather than say that sociopolitical art [estranged from art history] cannot be located in the stream of art history, let us question whether there is a thing such as ‘the history of art’ in which at each stage of a moving narrative the immediate past generates the present” (ibid., 321).
69. Andersen interview, 40. Also “Selz” e-mail.
70. Andersen e-mail, “Selz Addenda,” 7 December 2009.
71. Wayne Andersen, Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah (Geneva: Editions Fabriart, 2010). This thoroughly irreverent study must be among the most unorthodox “debunkings” in the critical literature of modern art. It is truly outside the academic mainstream, occupying a singular territory of its own. The angry and very long review by Francis Naumann at Toutfait.com (The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal), updated 7 December 2010, was answered by Andersen in an even longer counterpunch. Andersen clearly goes where others, including Peter Selz, fear to tread. Peter feels that Wayne goes “overboard in his condemnation of Duchamp,” but he thinks the book is important and agrees that the influence of Duchamp, over time, has been “largely negative” (e-mail from Selz to author, 19 May 2011).
72. Author interview with Jane Dillenberger, Berkeley, 12 June 2008, 2; hereafter Dillenberger interview.
73. Ibid., 4.
74. Ibid.
75. Telephone conversation with Peter Selz, 26 February 2009, about Selz’s association with Paul Tillich in connection with New Images of Man and his interest in collaborating with Christian existentialists.
76. Dillenberger interview, 7.
77. Ibid., 2.
78. Dillenberger’s handwritten note, returned with her review of her quotes, 4 October 2010.
79. Ibid.
80. Telephone conversation with Jane Dillenberger, 23 November 2009.
81. Author interview with Terrence Dempsey, 27 June 2007, 29–30.
82. Peter Selz, e-mail to author, 23 November 2009.
9. A CAREER IN RETIREMENT
1. His third and fourth marriages, to art historian Dolores Yonker in 1972, and then to Deirdre Lemert in 1978, were both short-lived, and he categorizes them as “big errors.” The late Dolores Yonker was a specialist in the art and cultur
e of Haiti, focusing on Vodun (Voodoo) as both artistic expression and religious practice. The level of her commitment and emotional engagement with her work should have appealed to Selz, but their marriage lasted only a few months. Deirdre Lemert was one of the Berkeley students who assisted Peter Selz with the research for Art in Our Times.
2. Carole Selz phone conversation with author, 13 April 2010.
3. Ibid.
4. Author interview with Carole Selz, San Francisco, 20 April 2007; hereafter Carole Selz interview. Also telephone interview with Carole Selz, 31 October 2009. Among Carole’s circle of Los Angeles art friends were Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, Walter Hopps, Robert Alexander, and Craig Kauffman. She was also a member of Ferus artist Bob Alexander’s Temple of Man in his home in Venice, California, a gathering place for artists and poets.
5. Carole Selz interview, 23.
6. Ibid., 47–48. Carole gives several examples of Donna Smith’s efforts to “warn her off” Peter. She and her expatriate husband, Hassel Smith, spent years in Bristol (where he taught art) and Bath, England, but he retained close ties to the Bay Area, where he had been on the UC Berkeley art faculty as visiting professor on several occasions. Despite their initial disapproval of Peter as a life partner for Carole, the Smiths maintained a friendly relationship with the Selzes over the years, visiting back and forth on various occasions, though it appears they were more Carole’s enthusiasm than her husband’s.
7. Ibid., 53.
8. Telephone interview with Carole Selz, 31 October 2009.
9. “I went to visit a cousin in Stuttgart. I’ll tell you why this is important— because it is. There was no twentieth-century modern architecture to be seen in Munich. They just didn’t have any. In Stuttgart I saw a beautiful building, a modern-designed department store by Erich Mendelsohn . . . the Schocken Department Store, part of the Schocken chain. And I liked it very much” (Memoir 4, 9). Mendelsohn, who moved to San Francisco in 1945, taught at Berkeley until his death in 1953.
10. For example, Peter initially had little interest in Hassel Smith’s work. But he took her on a visit to England as part of the courtship, and they visited the Smiths in Bristol. Before long he came around to join Carole in her appreciation of Smith’s earlier Abstract Expressionist painting. The two also disagreed about Sam Francis and others to whom Peter became devoted, including a number of younger artists of dubious talent (Carole Selz interview, 49).
11. In 1982 Carole Selz, while serving as chair of the Berkeley Parks Commission, independently (working with state government) established the first organizations in the country devoted to opening up urban creeks: Urban Creeks Council and Strawberry Creek Watershed Council. During her time on the board four creeks were opened and another restored. Telephone conversation with Carole Selz, 14 December 2009.
12. Letter to Selz from Simon Hucker, Jonathan Clark & Co. Fine Art, London, 6 May 2010.
13. Evidently, Selz to some degree identifies personally with Lindner: he notes in the Krevsky Gallery catalogue that Lindner fled Munich in 1933, three years before he himself did. The show traveled from Washington, D.C., to the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Peter’s essay, despite the rejection of the Pop label, nonetheless introduces Lindner as the only visual artist to appear on the Peter Blake–designed cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
14. Peter Selz, “Irving Petlin: The Committed Brushstroke,” Art in America, March 2010, 107. The concurrent Petlin exhibitions were at Kent Gallery, Jan Krugier Gallery, and Richard L. Feigen & Co.
15. According to Selz (e-mail to author, 4 August 2010), Botero selected Berkeley because of its reputation for political activism and free speech.
16. Peter Selz, e-mail to the author, 4 August 2010. His account of the acquisition of the Botero Abu Ghraib, a major political statement despite what detractors say about its artistic quality, also reflects Berkeley internal politics involving the administration and BAM, something with which the founding director is all too familiar.
17. Memoir 10B, 10–11.
18. Peter Selz, “Eduardo Chillida: Sculpture in the Public Domain,” in Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137. This essay draws from Selz’s book Chillida (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986) as well as from an article in Arts Magazine 63, no. 1 (September 1988): 84–87.
19. Selz, “Eduardo Chillida,” in Beyond the Mainstream, 141.
20. Notes from phone conversation with Peter Selz, 3 May 2010.
21. Selz, “Eduardo Chillida,” in Beyond the Mainstream, 132.
22. Memoir 10B, 11.
23. Herschel B. Chipp, Picasso’s “Guernica”: History, Transformations, Meanings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
24. Memoir 6, 6.
25. Memoir 7 (23 June 2008), 4.
26. Author interview with Carlos Villa and Mary Valledor, San Francisco, 12 January 2008, 15–17, 21, 24.
27. Rupert Garcia and Enrique Chagoya helped establish a visible Mexican American presence in Bay Area art. Both were involved in the founding and the early years of San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza, the politico-cultural center for Chicano art in the region (though the Mexican-born Chagoya does not describe himself as Chicano). Chagoya remembers meeting Selz in 1984 at “Artists’ Call Against Intervention in Central America,” a protest organized by Lucy Lippard and Salvadorean poets and held at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was a student at the time. Selz wrote a brief catalogue essay, which Chagoya says introduced him to Selz’s political position and “role as an art historian that goes beyond art for art’s sake.” Enrique Chagoya, “About Peter Selz,” in Selz (Sacramento: b. sakata garo, 2007), 29 (catalogue for exhibition Tribute to Peter Selz, November 2007).
28. What appears here is a statement by Chagoya derived from a phone conversation (27 December 2009) and e-mail (4 January 2010).
29. Selz, “Rupert Garcia: The Artist as Advocate,” in Beyond the Mainstream, 279.
30. Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984,” New Criterion, April 1984, 68; quoted ibid., 279.
31. Selz, “Rupert Garcia,” ibid., 279–80.
32. Telephone interview (4 January 2010) with and e-mail (7 January 2010) from Richard Buxbaum. A longtime faculty friend of Selz’s, Buxbaum admired Peter’s “passion and style.” He also was drawn to Peter’s exhibitions at the university museum; he himself collected modernist and contemporary art, and his own politics and suspicion of the administrative “mind” placed him somewhat in the Selz camp within the university. Buxbaum served on the defense team of certain important civil rights trials related to the Free Speech Movement and various Berkeley student protest actions.
33. Author interview with Rupert Garcia, Oakland, 3 June 2009, 19; hereafter Garcia interview.
34. Ibid., 3.
35. At the time Garcia, while working on his thesis, was also teaching at Berkeley in Chicano studies and popular culture.
36. Garcia interview, 15.
37. Ibid., 20.
38. Ibid., 21.
39. Ibid., 22.
40. Ibid., 25.
41. Anne Brodzky, e-mail to author, 6 January 2010.
42. Dore Ashton, “Homage to Peter Selz,” in Crosscurrents in Modern Art: A Tribute to Peter Selz (New York: Achim Moeller Fine Art, 2000), 14.
43. Ashton interview, 34–35.
44. Memoir 10A, 4.
45. Ibid., 5.
46. Ibid., 5, 6.
47. Memoir 10B, 1.
48. Sam Francis’s paintings may have no obvious political content, but his non-art “real world” activism indicates that his thinking was far left. Representing the Smithsonian Institution (a trust instrument of Congress), I had the personal experience of meeting with Sam Francis and confronting his political absolutism. My job was to invite him to leave his papers to the Archives of American Art. His response was polite enough, but essentially he let me know that he viewed me as a possible CIA op
erative. The Smithsonian, despite repeated efforts, never was designated his chosen repository.
49. Author interview with Nathan Oliveira, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 7 September 1980, 13; hereafter Oliveira interview. Donald Judd, reviewing Oliveira’s second show at the Alan Gallery, commented favorably on Oliveira’s use of “an advanced abstract technique” and his sharing the “malaise of the French Existentialists” (“In the Galleries,” Arts, November 1960, 54; quoted in Selz, Nathan Oliveira [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 64). This was in accord with a major theme in Selz’s New Images of Man, which had included the young Californian, at MoMA the preceding year.
50. Selz, Oliveira, 9.
51. Oliveira interview, 46–47; quoted ibid., 67.
52. Author interview with Nathan Oliveira, Stanford, 21 December 2007, 25–26.
53. Oliveira interview, 9.
54. Paula Kirkeby, e-mail to author, 11 January 2010. The following quotations are from this message.
55. Jack Rutberg, e-mail to author, 9 January 2010, recapitulating an interview conducted with author, Los Angeles, 4 April 2007. The following account and quotations are from this message.
56. Stephanie Barron, “Introduction: The Making of Made in California,” in Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, ed. Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort (Los Angeles: LACMA; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 27.
57. Rutberg e-mail, 9 January 2010.
58. Peter Selz, “The Art of Political Engagement,” in Made in California, 339–51.
59. Sabine Rewald et al., Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
60. German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1980). The Exhibition Committee: Peter Selz, Chairman, Professor, History of Art, University of California, Berkeley; Emilio Bertonati, Director, Galleria del Levante, Munich and Milan; Gregory Hedberg, Curator of Paintings, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Wieland Schmied, Director, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Berlin.
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