Peter Selz (10 page)

In retrospect, Barr came to regard what he initially viewed as “betrayal” by Abby as being in his best interests, for his new position allowed him to do the things he liked best without the administrative responsibilities. With typical modesty and admirable objectivity, Barr wrote, “I had some abilities as a writer, curator, showman . . . and perhaps a modicum of professional integrity, but I was inadequate as a fund raiser, general administrator and diplomat.”
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With the hiring of the far more diplomatic René d'Harnoncourt as director in 1944, the working team that ran the Modern that Selz joined was close to being established. D'Harnoncourt insisted on having Barr as a critical resource, and he frequently described his own “main duty” at MoMA as preserving and nourishing the “genius of Alfred Barr.”
⁹

When Peter joined MoMA's staff, his primary responsibilities, made clear by his title, had to do with the exhibition program. Acquisitions were handled by Barr. This curatorial arrangement, separating collections and exhibitions, was in place before Peter's arrival, and he heartily approved of it. In fact, MoMA was everything he could have hoped for— at the beginning, at least. His tenure there started on a high note:

 

It seemed to be at that point to be a very good arrangement. I didn't question it. I was on the acquisitions committee; I had a little voice— not a vote, but a voice. I thought the separation between collection and exhibitions made sense. I had a good staff. Alicia Legg was my number one assistant. I had this great welcome and, especially in the beginning . . . everybody was very cordial. But the marvelous thing was that I could do whatever I wanted. I would come to the curatorial meetings and propose some shows and they were generally accepted. It worked very, very well. Then after two years an associate curatorship was open, and I got Bill Seitz to work with me.
¹⁰

Peter's account of the “acquisition” of William C. Seitz by MoMA in 1960 is well worth telling, for it reveals his disarming but ultimately
damaging innocence regarding the internal dynamics of the museum. Peter truly believed that everyone, or almost everyone, liked him and wished him well. What he didn't seem to grasp was that there was a competitive underbelly to the institution, and he had a small company of detractors, despite his “cordial” welcome. Nonetheless, he proceeded with an optimistic view of the place and the people, and his memories preserve that sanguine perspective. In the beginning, as when he brought Seitz in as his assistant, that optimism may have been justified:

 

I was looking for somebody because I couldn't do it all by myself. When I met Bill [the study of] modern art was a very new thing. . . . One reason I respected Barr so much was that he and Meyer Schapiro really made modern art into a scholarly discipline. Bill was an assistant professor at Princeton . . . when I met him. He had written his dissertation on Abstract Expressionism, and he had finished his book on Monet. He suggested that we do a Monet show—the
Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments
exhibition [1960]. I liked the idea very much, and he came in as an independent curator. We got along beautifully, I loved the way he did the show, and I liked the way he wrote the catalogue.

I asked him if he'd be interested in being the associate curator, and he said yes. Then I went to René and he said, “Well, we thought you'd hire somebody on a lower level for this job. Do you really want somebody on the same level as you are?” Coming from academe, I thought this would work very well. “Yes, I think we'd get along fine, and we respect [one another]. We don't have exactly the same opinions . . . which is only a good thing.” And then we hired him. René was wrong because Bill and I worked out beautifully.
¹¹

The interviewer, however, picked up from this anecdote something that Peter had missed. She pointed out that René seemed to be telling him something larger, something about staff interaction and the working environment at the museum in general. At this point Selz acknowledged that, in a way, he was “very, very innocent.” As an example, he talked about what he perceived as the background machinations of Porter McCray, the museum staff person attached to the international program of the International Council and one of the few colleagues Peter actively disliked. Although Selz was in charge of exhibitions, McCray was responsible for
international
exhibitions. Peter and Arthur Drexler
(curator of the architecture and design department) protested what they saw as an artificial dichotomy, and eventually McCray had to give in. When asked about McCray's presence at the museum, Selz responded, “I never liked him . . . and I didn't quite know what to make of him. He was on a different wavelength from people like Alfred and René and Arthur and myself.
We
all got along very well.”
¹²

Porter McCray was a longtime and powerful presence at the Museum of Modern Art. His initial entrée was through Nelson Rockefeller, who in 1947, as chairman of the board, invited McCray to join the museum as director of circulating exhibitions. In November 1962 McCray arranged a “major” Mark Rothko exhibition for Paris. In fact, this was Peter's Rothko show, on view at MoMA in 1961 (18 January–12 March) before touring the United States for a year. Three weeks before the scheduled Paris opening, French culture minister André Malraux canceled the exhibition with no convincing explanation. In recalling the incident, Peter speculates that Malraux was acting in a thinly disguised way to protect French art from the competition posed by the up-and-coming New York School of painting.
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In any event, McCray went to the mayor of Paris, who obligingly offered basement space at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, “shabby” rooms that managed to be refurbished in time for the opening date.
¹⁴

Selz reports that there was considerable friction caused by the bifurcated nature of the exhibition program, divided between the national and international arms, with the final authority apparently falling to the latter. Selz also volunteered that as a Rockefeller appointee and favorite, McCray had special authority and privileges, including board membership. Furthermore, there were rumors—unverified—that McCray worked for the CIA.
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Given the tenor of the cold war times and the government practice of deploying civilian cultural representatives abroad for various covert and intelligence-gathering purposes, such rumors were not surprising.

Foreign venues for Peter's exhibitions grew fewer and farther between. The first exhibition Selz organized after arriving at MoMA was a small one for the first Paris Biennial. Titled
U.S. Representation: I Biennale de Paris
, it was, Peter recalls, memorable for introducing Robert
Rauschenberg to Paris. But at that early point in his MoMA tenure he began to see that there were, in his words, “some strange things going on in the museum.” He and Drexler determined that this confused situation regarding international authority within their departments could not continue: “We didn't want to have somebody else in charge of painting and sculpture or architecture and design. We felt that was what we had been hired for. Porter McCray ran his own institution [International Council], which we didn't know much about; it was sort of like the CIA. He never told anybody what was going on. He had his own press office in the building next door, and we never knew what they were doing either.”
¹⁶
More significant than the details of this organizational irregularity was the way René d'Harnoncourt dealt with it—or did not. Peter's account of the McCray problem may provide some degree of insight into the director's management style. After saying he never discussed the matter with Alfred Barr, Selz described his boss's usual answer for such things: “You'd talk to René about it and [he'd say], ‘We're going to work it out, everybody's going to be happy.' Any time you went to René about something he smoothed it over. . . . He was an extraordinary diplomat, and he tried to make everyone feel good. Every time you walked into his office with some kind of complaint, you walked out feeling good. [laughing] . . . But things did not really change.”
¹⁷

Having said this, Selz was eager to heap praise and admiration on the leading figures at MoMA, notably Barr and d'Harnoncourt. But he also had complimentary words for many others among his colleagues, in fact most of them. And his overall description of MoMA as an institution and of his experience working there was mainly positive, even enthusiastically so. He seemed most impressed, however, by the director, d'Harnoncourt:

 

Well, there was probably less infighting there than people thought, either among the staff or between the staff and trustees. One reason why things ran fairly smoothly was that René d'Harnoncourt was an absolutely brilliant director. He had been director for about fifteen years by the time I arrived, and here was this man with his highly polished European background, this great diplomat, an enormous man, six and a half feet tall. A man who had come—he dropped the “Count”
somewhere along the line—from the highest European aristocracy, and whom the trustees really admired. . . . And [he] knew how to handle the board with the greatest Habsburg kind of diplomacy. . . . He knew how to handle all the prima donnas, department heads and directors—he did a truly admirable job.
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Selz also had high praise for James Thrall Soby, the trustee who had stepped in to run the painting and sculpture department for a year after the departure of Andrew Ritchie: “Jim Soby was a trustee, collector, very active in the museum from the beginning. Always sort of the pinch hitter, he was a very able man. He was a great connoisseur, a marvelous critic—he was a critic at the time for the
Saturday Review
—and a very astute historian.”
¹⁹

Selz recalls a spirit of cooperation among the staff. Judging from his account, there was a sense of common purpose (actually, a mission) and encouragement to do original exhibitions without interference. Still, the limited exhibition space did foster some problems:

 

The museum space was—it's been enlarged many times since then— very limited, so there could only be about four major shows a year. And you had the painting and sculpture department, architecture and design, photography, prints and drawings, all ogling this space. So there was this competition, because if I did a big show, then Arthur Drexler couldn't do one, and we all were very eager to do big shows, even little shows. There were two [exhibition] areas, one medium-sized and one small. And it was important, very important, whether you had the first-floor or the third-floor space. One, the third, was bigger and had a lot more prestige. For instance, European painters were generally shown in the bigger space and Americans in the smaller space. . . . When I did the Rothko show, it was only the second new American artist show, the prior one being Pollock. Even that was in the smaller space. And I did not get the large space for Rothko; I got it for Dubuffet, and they were pretty much at the same time. [Rothko was 1961, Dubuffet 1962.]
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Perhaps the feature of the Museum of Modern Art's operation for which Selz was most grateful was a hands-off policy from the top that allowed for an unusual degree of curatorial creative independence. This was an atmosphere in which those receptive to new art and alternative expressions
within modernism could thrive, Barr's canon focused on French artists and movements notwithstanding. This freedom to engage art with an open mind, trusting intuition and personal excitement when confronting the unfamiliar and making judgments accordingly, became the basis for Selz's approach, and the artists he “discovered” and championed through writing and exhibitions were seldom those already established within existing critical circles, national or international. Although he encountered disapproval on a couple of occasions, most notably with Tinguely's self-destructing installation
Homage to New York
in the museum's garden, it seems no effort was ever made to rein in Peter or any of the curators:

 

One good thing about the Museum of Modern Art, one of the important things that I must emphasize . . . was that practically nothing was done by committee. Everything was done by individuals. . . . [But] not doing things by committee had interesting ramifications. For instance, years later when Bill Seitz and I left the museum, we had scheduled some shows that we were going to do. Bill was going to do a Noguchi show and I was going to do Sam Francis. These shows never happened at MoMA, and people said, “Well that's terrible, the museum just promises these shows and then doesn't do them.” In a way that's true, but on the other hand the shows were by committed individuals . . . who when they left took the idea with them.

Peter relished the freedom that came with the job, the opportunity to explore new directions and approaches: “I did part of the Venice Biennale in 1962. I organized many international shows. The big sculpture thing at Battersea Park in London, in the early sixties, where I introduced David Smith to Europe. Bill Seitz, Dorothy Miller, might do something similar abroad—but it was always individual initiative and commitment, never by committee.”
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This liberal approach to exhibitions is rare in contemporary museum practice. In the era of the blockbuster show and of complicated traveling exhibitions—necessarily involving great expense—museums now more typically operate through committee approvals. Selz, as museum curator, director, and now trustee, recognizes this as the salient difference between the 1960s and today. For that reason, his description of the working situation at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960s is both interesting and instructive:

 

Every
week we had a curatorial meeting, and you would bring up your ideas and they would be discussed around the table. But it was more a question of how you could schedule a show, how you could find the space. If Arthur Drexler wanted to do a show of Le Corbusier—which never took place because Corbu was not very cooperative—or whatever he wanted to do, I was not going to question it. He had the competence, which I acknowledged—and he acknowledged mine. Or [if] Bill Lieberman, who was in charge of prints and drawings [proposed something] . . . people wouldn't say, “No that's really not worthwhile.” That very rarely happened. But then, of course, everything had to get trustee approval.