Peter Selz’s experience and energy in the art world have led to important and challenging museum shows, and his work with Jeanne-Claude and me helped realize the Running Fence in 1976. I am happy his story is being told in this book.

Christo

The extraordinary career of one of the most energetic and, above all, creative figures in twentieth century art history is deftly described in this essential book. Dore Ashton, author of A Fable of Modern Art

In Sketches of a Life in Art, it’s clear that Peter Selz uniquely sees painting as if from within the artist himself, not as an outside observer (as when he describes the internal look of a Mark Rothko painting). And a moving Life it is. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Laureate of San Francisco and author of How to Paint Sunlight

Engaging and delightful, this book offers its readers a succession of alternative histories of modern and contemporary art, ranging from George Grosz to William Kentridge, looping back to bring in Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis, among many others. All reimagined in Peter Selz’s ambitious curatorial imagination to delve into the moment and discover. . .classical tradition. Perhaps only Paul Karlstrom, with forty years behind him using oral history to recover the hidden stories of twentieth-century art, could have followed the mirrors and mazes of Peter Selz’s career and told a story both clear and amazing. Readers will share the delight that Karlstrom discovers in his subject. Richard Candida Smith, author of The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century

“Peter Selz’s experience and energy in the art world have led to important and challenging museum shows, and his work with Jeanne-Claude and me helped realize the Running Fence in 1976. I am happy his story is being told in this book.”

―Christo

“The extraordinary career of one of the most energetic and, above all, creative figures in twentieth century art history is deftly described in this essential book.”―Dore Ashton, author of A Fable of Modern Art

“In Sketches of a Life in Art, it’s clear that Peter Selz uniquely sees painting as if from within the artist himself, not as an outside observer (as when he describes the ‘internal look’ of a Mark Rothko painting). And a moving Life it is.”―Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Laureate of San Francisco and author of How to Paint Sunlight

“Engaging and delightful, this book offers its readers a succession of alternative histories of modern and contemporary art, ranging from George Grosz to William Kentridge, looping back to bring in Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis, among many others. All reimagined in Peter Selz’s ambitious curatorial imagination to delve into the moment and discover. . .classical tradition. Perhaps only Paul Karlstrom, with forty years behind him using oral history to recover the hidden stories of twentieth-century art, could have followed the mirrors and mazes of Peter Selz’s career and told a story both clear and amazing. Readers will share the delight that Karlstrom discovers in his subject.”―Richard Candida Smith, author of The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century

Paul J. Karlstrom, former West Coast Regional Director of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, is the editor of On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900–1950 (UC Press) and a co-editor of Asian American Art: A History, 1860–1970. He is coauthor of Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920–1956 and author of Raimonds Staprans: Art of Tranquility and Turbulence.

Peter Selz

Sketches of a Life in Art

By Paul J. Karlstrom, Ann Heath Karlstrom

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26935-4

Contents

Preface: Setting the Scene, vii,
1. Childhood: Munich, Art, and Hitler, 1,
2. New York: Stieglitz, Rheingold, and 57th Street, 12,
3. Chicago to Pomona: New Bauhaus and Early Career, 27,
4. Back in New York: Inside MoMA, 48,
5. MoMA Exhibitions: From New Images of Man to Alberto Giacometti, 72,
6. POP Goes the Art World: Departure from New York, 97,
7. Berkeley: Politics, Funk, Sex, and Finances, 118,
8. Students, Colleagues, and Controversy, 149,
9. A Career in Retirement: Returning to Early Themes and Passions, 178,
10. A Conclusion: Looking at Kentridge and Warhol, 206,
Notes, 211,
Selected Bibliography and Exhibition History, 251,
Acknowledgments, 261,
Index, 265,

CHAPTER 1

Childhood

MUNICH, ART, AND HITLER

Peter Selz remembers clearly his first encounters with the art world, events that provided framework and meaning for the rest of his life. His maternal grandfather, Julius Drey, owned an art and antiques gallery in Munich, and early on he introduced his receptive grandson to the wonders of visual-arts high culture (Figs. 2 and 3). Peter was entirely captivated, his world taken over and his sense of who he was permanently formed. It was a world that he was determined to make his own.

Born at home on March 27, 1919, Peter was the younger son of Eugen Selz and Edith Drey. His grandparents on both sides were from German Jewish families that had been mainly in the greater Munich area for several generations, though Eugen’s grandfather was a rabbi in a small Franconian town, and Edith’s mother came from Leipzig (see Fig. 4). Edith had been previously married, and her first son, Paul Weil, lived with his father. Eugen and Edith’s first son, Edgar, was born in 1915, and then came Peter (see Fig. 6). His birth name was Hans Peter, but it was shortened by dropping the first name when he was five and then later changed to Peter Howard for his Americanization papers. He was a genuine Münchner by birth and upbringing, and that historic Bavarian city played an important early role in the formation of his thinking and his ultimate career trajectory.

Peter’s father was an ophthalmologist with a successful practice that, however, diminished during the mid-1930s as Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party became increasingly influential. Yet the rise of Hitler and Nazism was not the main thing Peter remembers from his youthful world. Although his education was abruptly truncated in 1935 with the expulsion of Jews from the German Catholic school system, his early memories consist of unrelated—and for the most part pleasant—experiences.

The house in which Edgar and Peter were born, overlooking the Isar River, stood on the northwest corner of Weidenmeyerstrasse and Liebigstrasse in the central district, and the family lived there for twelve years. The boys walked to school and back twice a day, returning home for lunch at midday. Peter remembers riding his bicycle to the Viktualienmarkt near Peterskirche, a location depicted in painstaking detail by Adolf Hitler in watercolor about twenty years earlier. Viewed from a much later perspective, this urban landscape gives an almost surrealistic cast to Munich as a quotidian stage on which German Jews and the architect of their annihilation shared the same temporal space.

From the large apartment on the Isar River, Peter recalled the move to a smaller but “still very nice” apartment in Schwabing, close to the boys’ school. After several years residing in those comfortable but somewhat reduced circumstances, the Selz family moved again. Dr. Selz’s office had been on Barerstrasse, between Theresienstrasse and Briennerstrasse—only a few blocks from the headquarters of Nazi power. But as the situation worsened, Peter’s parents combined family living quarters with Dr. Selz’s office in a smaller apartment on Theatinerstrasse, “which was not a good deal at all. Those last two years in Munich were a crowded situation…. My grandfather had a big place still. He was pretty well off. We did not live nearly as well as my grandparents did.”

Peter’s recollections of his early childhood and family life in Munich are mostly sanguine. He acknowledged, and seems to have accepted as normal for the time and place, an emotional distance between parents—especially mother—and offspring: “I was much closer to my father than my mother.” But asked if he felt deprived in terms of her attention, her love, he responded, “No, that’s the way it was.”

Until the Nazis came my childhood was very secure. Very well ordered. Sunday morning we’d have a family breakfast. Then we would visit my paternal grandparents, who were very old by that time. I had about an hour listening to what they had to say. Then we went to the Odeonsplatz … where the army band played Brahms and Beethoven. My first introduction to music, an army band playing great music, was not so good…. At 1:00 sharp we had Sunday dinner at my maternal grandparents’, the art dealer. And they lived very, very well. In the afternoon they visited us for coffee and cake. And then we had supper. Now, this was every Sunday.

Though remarkably matter-of-fact in most of his descriptions of those years, Peter remembers with fondness the mountain hikes in the Bavarian Alps with his father and, often but not always, his brother, Edgar. He describes these outings as the best part of his family life:

We always went into the Alps, and one time we went as far as the Dolomites. Another time we went to Chamonix. And then across the Mer de Glace, which was very hazardous—we had this guide who took us across the ice. The glacier is now melting. I was a great hiker. They tell me I walked eight hours when I was four years old [a story that Edgar corroborates]…. I was very close to my father then, because he took me everywhere so we could hike together. Those were wonderful, wonderful times—we went hiking in the mountains the winter before I left for America, just my father and I.

Peter’s mother, however, seems more absent than present during this time. He continues: “My mother spent most of her time with her lady friends, and especially with her parents, whom she said she knew longer than she knew my father or us. So that’s where she spent a lot of her time. Until I was seven the person I was close to was my nanny. I was crestfallen when she left.”

That is the exception to Peter’s dispassionate early-life partial amnesia—the bittersweet memory of his nanny, Rosa. When asked whom he liked better, his nanny or his mother, he answered without hesitation, “My nanny.” Several stories and memories, even a few photographs, touchingly bear witness to this deep childhood attachment as well. One studio photograph (see Fig. 5) depicts a nude young Peter sitting with his hand on Rosa’s shoulder. He has kept the tiny print as a valued souvenir over these many years, and is still pained by the way his parents dismissed Rosa and failed to tell him she would not be returning at the end of her summer break, as she had done reliably thus far. Peter described how he would collect rocks and other aesthetic objects on his hikes along the mountain streams, putting them in boxes that he would present to Rosa upon her return. He had her gift box waiting at the end of the summer when she did not reappear. He never saw her again. His disappointment remains palpable after almost eighty years.

The other most important person for Peter at that time was Grandfather Drey. Several times a month Peter and Edgar would meet their grandfather at the Alte Pinakothek, the venerable Munich art museum. Edgar remembered that they got “a wonderful strange religious education from paintings of the old masters…. And Peter was particularly interested…. I had other interests.” Eventually it was just Peter and his grandfather on these forays. According to Peter, they went in sequence to see the Flemish paintings, then on the next visit the Dutch, and on yet another, the Italian. With pride he credits his family mentor with knowing a “great, great deal” about art. “He realized that I was very interested in the paintings. And he would talk about them. The Four Apostles by Dürer, Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Isaac, a late Titian. He would tell me what was going on, the stories, what the painting was about. And the painters. He was totally self-taught.”

Peter’s chronicles of his past connect Germany to his life in America in interesting ways. One telling example is the account of his earliest contact with German Expressionist artists. Once again, the crucial figure is his art-dealer grandfather:

He introduced me to art…. And when he saw my response he took me almost every week. But the masters who interested me the most when I was a kid were the most expressionistic, the prototypes. Especially Rembrandt, El Greco, and [Matthias] Grünewald…. And before long I actually saw the contemporary Germans in what was a precursor to the big decadent art show [Entartete Kunst] that Hitler put on in 1937. I was gone by that time, but in 1935 there was a smaller version. So interestingly enough, at the main police station in Munich you saw Kandinskys, Klees, Kirchners, and Beckmanns. Which were already vilified at that point as degenerate. I remember seeing these very badly installed paintings, and I found them extremely interesting.

In 1934, with encouragement and advice from his grandfather, Peter set out on his first vagabond experience, a bicycle expedition with a close friend, Herbert Kahn, through the Alps into Venice (see Fig. 7). He describes it as the greatest adventure of his early years:

When we were fifteen, I liberated myself and my friend. We went to Italy, and I have pictures. This whole album is from our Venetian trip. We went to Venice, to Verona. Saw the Fascist monuments. I knew where to go. And Vicenza, see? [looking at photos] Went to see the Giorgione [Enthroned Madonna with St. Liberalis and St. Francis, ca. 1500] in Castelfranco. We went by bicycle, all the way, over the Alps. We had no money. The Germans didn’t allow us to carry money across the border.

[Reconsidering when asked how he survived]: Well, we had a little money. We slept on the ground or in haylofts in barns. But connections I did have. My grandfather sent me a postcard with the name of a big art dealer in Venice. His place was right near Ponte dell’Accademia. He helped us out…. He was an art and antique dealer.

These images of the golden days with his grandfather looking at art in the Alte Pinakothek and of his youthful journey with a friend to Venice are, in a sense, part of the Selz “creation myth,” at once validating of his subsequent life and career and beautifully anticipatory, so congruent with what was to come as to be almost irresistible. Older brother Edgar, interviewed when he was in his nineties, confirms the essence of the story: “Peter was a remarkable young boy, because he got so involved in art. He spent a lot of time in the museums and art galleries. He knew every painting. And our grandfather encouraged it. He made him.” Peter burned with desire—nothing else would do—to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and be surrounded by beautiful and thrilling objects, enjoying them and making a living by finding, buying, and selling them.

Julius Drey died in 1934, and Peter was affected deeply. “He was the person I was closest to in my family, and he died when I was fifteen. That was a great loss.”

* * *

During those formative years, Peter belonged to a German Jewish youth group known as Werkleute (Working People). Such youth groups were a solid part of German cultural life, dedicated generally to providing healthful activities, both physical and intellectual. In the 1920s and ’30s, however, as German society became increasingly nationalistic, so did the youth groups, particularly those, such as Hitler Youth, associated with the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Brown Shirts. The Jewish version, as in other things always a separate but related phenomenon, grew to importance in mobilizing the young for immigration and the inculcation of Zionist objectives, and it became an important—even crucial—part of the Selz immigration story as well. Not only was the youth group a context in which young German Jewish lives were molded and directed, but it is in contrast to this positive experience that the Nazi reality in Peter’s past becomes more vivid: “The other important memory,” he recalls, “was what was going on in the countryside with that youth group. Every Sunday when I was a little older—maybe when my grandfather died, 1934 or ’35—we would go out to the countryside and hike and play ball. And other youth groups would be there too, and we would see the Nazis, the kids in their brown shirts…. We were running around, and they were regimented. They would be marching, and we would be playing and running.”

Peter has described himself—and this was seconded by brother Edgar—as an indifferent student. He was simply more interested in art and a future career as a dealer, following in his grandfather’s footsteps. But Peter’s dislike of school was hardly unique. According to his account, it was shared by many students: “Like all kids in Germany, we hated, hated school. School was horrible. We did learn something. We had to. But we all hated school so much that kids who cheated best at tests were the heroes because they were doing something against the establishment. Against the system. But I did a lot of reading. As far as team sports, I was never very good. But I was a good runner, hiker, and swimmer. And I looked at the art books that my grandfather gave us.” Judging from Peter’s attitudes toward school and academic work, and the fact that for the last year he was in Germany he could not attend school at all, it seems reasonable to assume that his intellectual and physical development took place largely within the framework of the Werkleute and its activities. Beyond bicycle tours and hikes, the group engaged in conversation about important writers, left-wing political discussions, and Zionist planning for a future in Palestine. The group’s objectives amounted to a survival strategy conceived and directed by a liberal network of elders, the ultimate objective being to escape Germany, find sanctuary elsewhere, and pursue the main goal of realizing the Zionist dream, while still maintaining German Jewish cultural ideals. Although Zionism was a minority position among German Jews, ultimately the Werkleute played an important role in maintaining Jewish identity for a soon-to-be scattered population.

The apparent intellectual and cultural level of these high school–age Jews was impressive. In this respect the youth groups seemed notably serious, focused, and directed. Peter describes the political focus as an important influence on his life and his way of looking at art. His social conscience and commitment form one thread of his career, culminating in Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (2006). In the book’s prologue he invoked his youthful encounters with what he referred to several times in the interviews as “fascist aesthetics”: “My interest in the critical relationship between art and politics stems in large part from my personal history. In the mid-1930s in Munich, where I grew up, I witnessed the gigantic spectacles that Hitler organized: huge floats with sculptures glorifying the Nibelungs and the gods of Valhalla and depicting German medieval knights as descendents of Greek athletes rolled down the flag-bedecked streets in unprecedented pageantry.” He also describes his early questioning of authority, equating parents with the establishment:

We resented pretty much what our parents did, and what the establishment did. This is very important because from the very beginning I was anti-establishment. And by the time I was seventeen I called myself a socialist. I had a pretty good idea [what that meant]—I was reading Marx when I was sixteen, and I used to quote his Manifesto. I was reading political literature and poetry. Rilke was important, and Hermann Hesse’s novels. The writers who are still important today, they were important to me. It [liberal political thinking] all goes right back to that time. Absolutely. One particular artist I knew about, really knew and liked a lot, was Käthe Kollwitz…. Yes, our group thought of itself as political.

Thus Selz puts additional components of his story into place: his political engagement and challenging of authority. By implication he ascribes these qualities to his youthful compatriots in the Jewish youth group that seems to have constituted, especially in Munich, the main source of his social conscience. He also characterizes the Werkleute spirit as fundamentally idealistic, even utopian.

Peter mentioned Goethe and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber as figuring importantly on the young people’s reading list. At the suggestion that this was quite advanced for such a young group, Peter agreed. “I know. But we were fairly mature. Yes, we were intellectual. We read books by Buber and then tried to figure the ideas out in discussion sessions. Karl Marx, who we also read and discussed. Also the poet Stefan George—we have to create a better world. That was the idea.”

(Continues…)Excerpted from Peter Selz by Paul J. Karlstrom, Ann Heath Karlstrom. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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