Peter Selz (5 page)

For Peter, Gina was the great event of his first five years in New York. And as a companion, she was a part of his other object of desire, as he shared his “romance” with the New York art world with her, creating a thoroughly seductive experience. Then Gina unexpectedly “dropped him,” as he put it. But he had close at hand something to replace her, finding some degree of consolation in throwing himself even further into the art social scene. As she observed, with the “gallery-crawling” life he was in his element. In this observation she was not only perceptive but also prescient. Peter was a natural creature of the insular and self-congratulatory world of galleries, dealers, and artists.

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When Peter came to live with the Liebmann family in 1936, he enrolled in the Fieldston School of Ethical Culture (the humanistic secular high school) in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Founded by Felix Adler in 1878, the school has a long list of notable (and sometimes notorious) alumni, many of them art world luminaries—artists as well as
administrators. Whether or not he was aware of it, Peter was in the right company for the realization of his ambitions. Victor D'Amico, who headed the art department at the school from 1926 to 1948, was also director of the education department at the Museum of Modern Art for more than thirty years until his retirement in 1969. Their paths were to cross again.

As Peter was approaching the end of his only year at the school, he was asked at one of the Liebmann family meetings around the table what he would like to do; he couldn't stay in school indefinitely. He responded that, in light of his own family history, he'd like to make a living doing something in art. This was met with the disapproving observation that “we already have one relative in the art business”— Peter remembers and has often repeated the exact wording of the following judgment—“and nothing's ever become of Cousin Alfred.” At his very first opportunity, of course, Peter went to introduce himself to this “unsuccessful” relative—Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery, An American Place, was on Madison Avenue.

A career in art did not come immediately or directly, however. Upon graduation from Fieldston, Peter spent a year at Columbia University before his parents arrived in 1939, whereupon he supported himself and them by working at the Liebmanns' Rheingold brewery in Bushwick. But Peter benefited enormously from the fortuitous opportunity to spend time with Stieglitz, who was among the leading advocates of modernist art, American as well as European. Peter describes Cousin Alfred as picking up in New York where Grandfather Drey left off back in Munich: “If my grandfather was my first mentor, Alfred Stieglitz was my second.”
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Peter described the beginning of this relationship: “I introduced myself to Stieglitz and spent all the time I could hanging out at the gallery and meeting all the artists. He loved to talk. I didn't know anything about modern art at that point, and he started telling me what it was all about.”
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These conversations continued over some time: “He sort of took me under his wing, and I spent a great deal of the spare time I had at the American Place, talking to him—or rather more listening to him—and watching him, and looking at the Doves, O'Keeffes, and Marins he had on the wall. Those were the only painters he still had in those days. And
I learned a great deal from Stieglitz about how to look at painting, what modern art meant, about the aesthetics and the social values.”
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Stieglitz also introduced Peter to his patron/colleague (and lover), Dorothy Norman, who had helped Stieglitz establish An American Place. Although Peter was working long days in the brewery—it was the Depression and there was no other work—he managed to get several of his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke poems published in Norman's literary journal,
Twice a Year
. The boost to his self-esteem and confidence is evident in his proud telling of this achievement and its literary and intellectual ramifications:

 

I suddenly found myself in the same magazine with André Gide and Thomas Mann. I was this poor immigrant working in this brewery, and so I just lived for this kind of thing. But by that time I also went around New York to a lot of the galleries and met some of the art dealers, especially the Germans who had come over here, [Karl] Nierendorf, J. B. Neumann, and Curt Valentin. Neumann, with whom I became very friendly, was second in importance to me after Stieglitz. I spent a lot of time there and got more involved in modern art at that point, especially through those three galleries—also [Otto] Kallir. And I was very much in touch with these people, so I got involved in contemporary art on that level at that time, and read a lot—read the art magazines.
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On another occasion he noted, “Basically this was my context, with Stieglitz on the one hand and the 57th Street dealers on the other—until I went into the army.”
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The indisputable low point of Selz's initial period in New York was the three miserable years spent working at the Rheingold brewery. He acknowledges that he would have infinitely preferred a job in one of the 57th Street galleries, as was Gina's good fortune thanks to Peter, who introduced her to the world of art commerce. The painful irony for Peter was that it was when Gina was hired away from Karl Nierendorf by Otto Kallir that she broke off their engagement. She eventually became a partner in the business, which is now owned by Jane Kallir, Otto's granddaughter.
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“Hildegard worked in this aristocratic gallery, and I had a lousy, horrible job in a brewery in Brooklyn.”
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To the degree his brewery work and family responsibilities allowed, Peter managed to immerse himself in the art life with some success.
He met Georgia O'Keeffe and Kurt Seligmann, the only one of the Surrealists he encountered at that time. “I saw Marin around, but did not really have much contact then.”
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But his difficult circumstances, above all at the brewery, dominated those years: “I didn't know what I was going to major in my freshman year at Columbia. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. I actually had to take the job in that brewery in order . . . to support my parents. I worked there for three horrible years; there were a lot of Nazis working around me—German people.”
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Beyond the decent wage, there was little to recommend the Rheingold brewery as a workplace for a slender eighteen-year-old German Jewish boy. Peter recalls the situation:

 

That brewery job was pretty well paid because it had a strong union. All the brewers were Germans. And the people who worked for them were all Nazis. I suffered much more from anti-Semitism there than I ever did when I was a kid in Germany. There were these big, big brewers. These were big strong guys. And I was the Jew boy. I was put in there by the boss. And these were the union boys whose union meetings were in German. And they celebrated every time there was a victory, which was almost every day, by the German army. That was '39 and '40. . . . They'd drag in extra beer. They belonged to the German-American Bund in New York, where they marched in brown shirts, some of them. You know, you could do that before Pearl Harbor.
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The German Jewish Liebmann family had founded the brewery in the mid-nineteenth century and over generations had experienced the vagaries of political events and their effect on their business. When Peter told the Liebmanns of his treatment, they replied with a philosophical “That's the way things are.” He was the only Jew working in the brewery, and “they [the Germans] weighed 300 hundred pounds and I weighed 100 pounds.” In the end, the abuse was more psychological than physical—“No, they couldn't do that”—but it took its toll and Peter longed to escape. His deliverance came unexpectedly at the hands of the draft board and U.S. Army in early 1942. Looking back, Selz remarks, with more than a hint of pride at having survived those three years at the brewery, “None of our colleagues in academia or the museums have that kind of a background, that's for sure.”
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In fact, he bears to this day a small souvenir of his tribulations in
Bushwick. It is the result of an accident involving two barrels of beer and a conveyor belt on which it was Peter's tedious job to place beer bottles ready to be filled. Somehow the equipment jammed and he almost lost two fingers. The tip of one finger is deformed because the reattachment was faulty. The upside of this experience was workers' compensation and six weeks off, during which time he had his first art job, helping Kate Steinitz mount an exhibition of refugee painters—among them Fernand Léger and Lyonel Feininger—for the 1939–40 New York World's Fair in Queens. Kate, a close associate of the artist Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, Germany, was the mother of Batz, one of Peter's close
Werkleute
friends. “She was almost like a mom to me in many ways,” he said.
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Kate was in New York at that time before she came to California, and she put on a painting show at the World's Fair called
New Americans. . . .
Many of the Surrealists, well-known artists and a lot of now-forgotten, were shown. And I helped her hang the show. Yes, that was my first experience with exhibitions, helping Kate Steinitz to hang the pictures. We remained very close until she died [in 1975]. In the early forties she came out here to visit her daughter, and she became sick with a kidney ailment and went [in Los Angeles] to the big specialist Elmer Belt. She noticed that he had some books on Leonardo . . . and she talked him into starting this important research library at UCLA. She wisely built herself in, and he eventually turned it all over to her and provided the funds. She became a Leonardo scholar. Many years later I sort of paid back a little by hiring her to teach Renaissance art at Pomona College. So she was among the important people for me—Stieglitz, the German art dealers, and then Kate Steinitz.
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Steinitz was also instrumental in bringing Peter together with another lifelong friend, Kenneth Donahue, an art historian and docent at MoMA who was, many years later, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

 

Kenny was a docent at the Modern. So I got involved with the Museum of Modern Art and spent a lot of time with him. Kate had a little salon. We had both arrived in New York at the same time, I from Germany, and he from Louisville . . . and we became very, very good friends. As a matter of fact, Kenny was the chief witness when I got my citizen papers
[in 1942 in Brooklyn]. You had to have two American witnesses, and I had my friends Kenny and Daisy Donahue.
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Peter had filed his first papers toward citizenship, the declaration of intent forms, as required soon after his arrival in the United States. He signed his naturalization papers, as Peter Howard Selz, on 3 March 1943 at the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn. Having been drafted into the army as an enemy alien, he was “exceedingly happy” (his brother Edgar's description) to have at last shed his citizenship in the Third Reich.

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Selz's military experience was relatively uneventful. He was drafted as a regular in the Army Signal Corps, but once he had U.S. citizenship he spent a year volunteering for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He never was shipped overseas, and by his own account, he “didn't do very much” during his army tenure.

 

I was in communications training near Washington, in a secret place [Langley, Virginia] where the CIA is now. It was a very strange thing . . . on a hillside in Virginia, and we weren't supposed to know where we were. They took us away for weekend passes—in a truck with tarpaulins over it so that we couldn't tell where we were—dropping and picking us up at Union Station [Washington, D.C.]. The other guys . . . you could talk to them about everything, except your past and future. [laughter] There wasn't much to say. By the time my training was completed, they didn't need people in Europe; the war was over. Then they sent me to another camp before I could be discharged, for almost a year—in Oklahoma.
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Judging from Selz's photos, the high point of his army career and proudest moment as a soldier took place in basic training. Two photos in the scrapbook tell the story. One shows Peter with huge boxing gloves on, smiling and squatting on the ground (
Fig. 10
); in the other he is standing over a fallen opponent. “In basic training, 1942, there was this guy, and he didn't like me. He was practically pulling me down. I didn't like it. And so he said he was going to challenge me to a fight. I had never had
gloves on in my life. This was a big, big guy—and I beat him.”
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Another photo shows Peter with the medal he won for “sharp shooting.” It seems that as well as a natural boxer, the new draftee was also a marksman. These achievements, and the pleasure with which he recounts them for interviewers, come as a bit of a surprise, unless we acknowledge a strong competitive streak in this self-described humanist committed to the life of the mind.

Two other stories from the army years provide a further idea of how Peter bided his time in the military, waiting for his service to be completed so that he might resume his efforts toward making a living out of his interest in art. One of the ironies of Peter's army career was his volunteering for the OSS, which he discovered only much later was the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. At an army ski camp in Wisconsin, Peter was approached by the company commander, who asked him if he was willing to volunteer for hazardous service. “I asked him what it would be, and he said that he could not tell me more. I thought about it for a short time and, feeling very strongly about the war, said, yes, I would.”
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Times and attitudes change; two decades later Selz was avidly demonstrating against the Vietnam War and the role of the CIA, to which some assign the covert operational blame for drawing the United States into that conflict.
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