Peter Selz (2 page)

As former classmate and colleague Charles Leslie observed, “Peter has accomplished a great deal. He is distinguished in his field. And of course that creates a significant ego. To achieve at that level you need to believe that you are somehow special, gifted, even better than most of your colleagues.”
³
To be an artist, that is certainly the case. Against all odds, more often than not, you must believe in yourself fully, and believe that your work eventually will demonstrate that you are not only good but superior. Peter is among those few art historians who personally identify with artists.

Peter is a creature not only of his times but also of the moment. And that fact has informed and energized his approach to art as well as life. He is, in his mind, very much one of those fascinating, even enviable, creative individuals whose lives and works he has carefully observed and promoted in his frequently effusive writing and imaginatively conceived exhibitions. Though deficient in artistic talent himself, something he recognized at an early age, Peter Selz nevertheless found a way to live
the art life. This seemed to be his defining ambition, and it probably provides the greatest insight into the course his career has followed. As his younger daughter, Gabrielle, said, “Peter is a force of nature”—and therefore, as she makes quite clear, is “accountable only to himself.”
⁴

The reception was under way in the cramped foyer of the Museum of Folk Art. A modestly sized group, perhaps forty or fifty individuals, enjoyed wine while conversing and congratulating the honorees—and one another. The bad weather had discouraged some of Peter's friends (he looked around for his art and politics soul mate, writer-critic Dore Ashton). But Gabrielle, his wife, Carole, and several other loyal friends were there.

The marvelous Martín Ramírez exhibition upstairs excited Peter. Roberta Smith in her
New York Times
review challenged the art world to dispute her claim that outsider Ramírez, whose extraordinary drawings were distinguished by entirely original imagery, was “simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.” He was, she intimated, as “modern” as any “insider” artist in the neighboring Museum of Modern Art.
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Peter was as exhilarated by the work as if he had discovered the artist on his own. He had at least helped lay the groundwork: his was among the most consistent voices insisting, during the heyday of high modernism and Greenbergian formalist thinking, that the MoMA canon did not represent the complete story of modernist art. He was looking “beyond the mainstream” to understand the depth and reach of modernism. Multiplicity, diversity, and inclusion defined Peter's understanding of modernism, and his writings and exhibitions hewed closely to that perspective. He was among those inclusive art observers who prepared the way for writers like Smith to embrace artists who operated outside the standard accepted art-historical categories. That very theme ran through the brief statement read shortly thereafter back at the Hilton during the presentation to Peter of the award for the best art book of 2006.

Selz was being honored by the College Art Association as author of
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond
(California, 2006), an impressive and generally successful melding of modern art and politics, the two main concerns of his career. This moment was in some ways the culmination of his professional life. For Selz, modern art in the
service of humanity has been a guiding principle in his writing, his exhibition themes, and his left-leaning political action. The presentation text drew that critical connection between art and life while implicitly honoring his contributions to CAA over many years of active membership and one term as president:

 

Peter Selz's politically courageous book is the most recent work in an important body of art-historical and critical writing by a distinguished scholar. . . . From his work on German Expressionism in the mid-1950s to the present book, Selz has placed art in a social and political context. He had never accepted the limitations of formalism or stylistic “isms” as the only means of analyzing art. . . .
Art of Engagement
is a landmark achievement [that] . . . crowns Selz's lifelong commitment to the importance of understanding the relationship between art and the context in which it is made.
⁶

While honoring Selz's most recent book, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in fact effectively served as one bookend to an extraordinary career. The other,
German Expressionist Painting
(1957), had appeared half a century earlier. These two publications serve as well as anything to mark the journey that carried Peter Selz from his art-infused Jewish boyhood in Munich, on the threshold of Hitler's ascendancy, to New York City and his assimilation into the American art world.

•    •    •

This biography, constructed largely from oral history interviews, is intended to provide a variety of perspectives on the subject.
⁷
At the same time, no matter how revealing it may be of professional behavior and accomplishment, political ideas, private and domestic life, relationships and associations, and character, the resulting portrait will surely be incomplete. Yet within the limitations of this approach, the many voices heard should give a rich sense of the man. In addition, from the interviews emerge insights into the period, the museum world, the evolution of ideas about art, and dramatic shifts in American society and politics.

Peter Selz is aware of himself as a participant in life, and he has managed to create an image that suits him. In doing so, he—like most of us—has
ignored or suppressed certain qualities and behaviors. The richness of biography is not just in the achievements, but also in the shortcomings and even failures that are unavoidable fellow travelers. It is this more human story, with the inevitable attendant flaws and self-delusions, that gives authenticity and vitality to an account of Peter Selz's long and productive life in the world of art.

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.
¹
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.”
²

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.”
³

 

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.
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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.
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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.”
⁶

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.”
⁷
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.
⁸
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.
⁹
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.”
¹⁰

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: