Peter Selz (9 page)

I'll try to tell you exactly as I remember it. I think it started in Karl Benjamin's studio. . . . I was looking at his new work and liked it a
lot. We talked about that kind of work and I mentioned I was doing the McLaughlin essay [an introduction for a show at the Felix Landau Gallery]. And he said, “Why don't you do an exhibition of this group?” . . . I saw Hammersley every week and always admired [Lorser] Feitelson, and so I suggested to them that we do the exhibition . . . at Pomona. I called them all together in my living room in Claremont to discuss the show. But in the meantime, I was offered and accepted the appointment at the Museum of Modern Art. This was late spring 1958 and I had to finish things up at Pomona, including the dedication of a new gallery building, and go to New York in a matter of months.

So I asked [art critic and art historian] Jules Langsner—who was a friend and as much in tune with these artists as I was—if he would carry through on the project. He thought it was a wonderful idea and agreed. The six of us met and decided to proceed, with Jules taking over the exhibition. He said he could probably place it at the County Museum, which he did. As far as the title of the show was concerned, after six or seven suggestions, Jules came up with a term nobody had heard of, Hard Edge painting. Most people think that is a New York term, invented by Lawrence Alloway. But it came up right there in my living room in Claremont. None of the artists liked it, so I said, “Look, we have Abstract Expressionism; let's call this—after all, it's in the classical tradition—Abstract Classicism.” And they thought that was a great idea. Oh, yes, the title was my idea; the show was my idea. Jules mentioned the word “hard edge” in his introduction to the catalogue, which was called
Four Abstract Classicists
. [pause] You know, maybe you want to publish this particular part of the interview.
⁴³

Equally inspired, certainly from the standpoint of dramatically enhancing the collegiate and regional cultural experience, was Selz's idea to place a mural by the artist Rico Lebrun in proximity to the great Orozco
Prometheus
in Pomona's Frary Hall. The resulting mural is called
Genesis
. Peter recalls that in 1956 he mounted an exhibition of Rico's work, in which he was “tremendously interested.”

 

During that time I met the local collector Donald Winston . . . who had come to some of the college gallery exhibitions. He asked if there was anything he could do for Pomona, so I thought about it and said, “Well, if you really want to do something for Pomona the most marvelous thing—since Rico has spoken about his desire sometime in his life to do a mural—is to let us find a place on campus and pay for it.” The
three of us met that same night, and the thing got going. We had to get permission and we had to get the wall. Rico and I admired enormously the Orozco mural and so we found a nearby wall just outside Frary Hall.

The president said, “Well, let him bring some sketches to show to the Buildings and Grounds Committee and see if they approve.” Rico and I didn't want to do that. I knew that there was not a single person on this committee who had any understanding of modern art. And if they liked art at all, it was the Millard Sheets kind, which they saw around them all the time. So I said, “Look, when you hire a professor you don't ask him or her to give sample lectures; you hire on the basis of previous accomplishments. Here are all the catalogues, reviews, and work that Rico has done.” This was an important precedent at the time, and it took about six months to get the idea through committee.
⁴⁴

Rico went off to Yale and then to the Academy in Rome, where he developed the design for
Genesis
. There were still problems involved, such as his own idea of competing with, or being in the same building with, Orozco. But he wanted the challenge. He decided that the mural should be painted in black and gray. The powerful result is a departure from the expected in mural tradition, and Millard Sheets, who considered Rico a competitor, an interloper in his home territory, predictably hated the design and vociferously campaigned against it. With the ongoing support of Donald and Elizabeth Winston, however, Selz prevailed and the Lebrun mural was installed at Pomona.

At the same time, Peter continued to cast his gaze westward toward Los Angeles, where he had become aware of—or as he put it, “close to”— the Ferus Gallery artists. Perhaps as early as 1957, the year of the gallery's opening, but certainly with the benefit of hindsight, he recognized Ed Kienholz, Walter Hopps, and the Ferus Gallery as driving some of the most exciting art in Southern California. Although in the end Peter hitched his wagon to the more formalist, polite work of the Abstract Classicists, his natural instincts might have been expected to draw him to the irreverent, antitraditional bohemians—notably Kienholz, Foulkes, and Berman—who constituted the Ferus circle.

In some respects, again drawing upon his earliest exposure to American modern art under the tutelage of Alfred Stieglitz, Peter's grand finale exhibition at Pomona was the most important. More than any other
show,
Stieglitz Circle
demonstrated how his individual view of modernist art was shaped and what it meant:

 

That was in 1958 and people paid very, very little attention to that [modern] aspect of American art. Now, [in 1982,] O'Keeffe has become the great culture heroine. At that time, she was considered some kind of sentimental flower painter. That was really the attitude in the late 1950s about this kind of American painting, and I felt strongly that this had to be reexamined. Nobody had paid serious attention to these artists for fifteen, even twenty years. For the opening of the new Pomona facility I did this show called
Stieglitz Circle
, which included O'Keeffe, Marin, Dove, and Hartley. And the early work of Max Weber and Demuth. While I was working on the show I had to go to New York to borrow important pictures, which at the time were fairly easy to get because nobody was paying attention to this group. So we could get the very best examples. My main sources were Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art.
⁴⁵

At the Museum of Modern Art, Peter was talking to Alfred Barr, then director of the museum collection, about borrowing pictures, and Peter reports that Barr said, “If you have this kind of vision, if you do this kind of show now, well, this is interesting.” Barr had seen Peter's recently published
German Expressionist Painting
, and he commented on its superiority to the catalogue they had just published for their German show, saying, “This is what
we
should have done.” And then he said, “Why don't you come and take over the painting and sculpture exhibitions department?”
⁴⁶

By the time the Pomona show opened, Selz was in fact on his way to his new job at the Museum of Modern Art.
Stieglitz Circle
constituted a major statement about Selz's approach, his vision, and his ability to make the right modernist connections, and virtually announced what he would do at MoMA. His vision for the future is contained in his retrospective appraisal of the show and its reception: “The comments were positive, but it was still too early. America wasn't ready for this kind of evaluation. It took a few more years. Everybody was totally involved in Abstract Expressionism. They were interested in the earlier American modernists as a nostalgia kind of thing. Nobody saw the connections
between Dove, or Marin, and the new kind of painting. But some New York artists got it.”
⁴⁷

Peter Selz was now prepared to make his mark on the modern art world from the most effective bully pulpit available, the Museum of Modern Art. With the preparation provided by Chicago and Pomona, he was fully equipped to establish a singular intellectual position and an international reputation.

INSIDE M
O
MA

Peter's personal
relationship to the Museum of Modern Art reaches back to the 1930s; he recalls visiting it regularly and wishing he could get a job there selling postcards. He could not then have imagined the realization of that youthful dream, but the day after the 1958 dedication of the new gallery at Pomona, he went directly to New York—“I could postpone it no longer”
¹
—to begin his new job as curator of modern painting and sculpture exhibitions at MoMA.

A year earlier the former curator, Andrew Ritchie, had departed to become director of the Yale Art Gallery, which created the fortuitous vacancy that Selz was hired to fill. Ritchie's associate curator, Sam Hunter, was not being considered for promotion. Selz recalls that there were about half a dozen people vying for the position, “people who have become prominent in the American art world.”
²
But it was Peter who got
the nod. This appointment took him back to New York for what surely must have been considered the top museum job in the modern art field.

It looked as though Peter's art career was unfolding exactly on schedule—though he did not actually expect to get the job, considering the competition: “I was very much surprised. I thought the offer would go to somebody older and much more established. The only museum experience I had was running a little college gallery on a shoestring, so I was amazed. . . . I think the job was offered to one other person, who turned it down. I'm not sure, but I believe it was offered to [art critic and art historian] Leo Steinberg—who also had no museum experience at all.”
³
After acknowledging the obvious fact that, surprisingly, experience working in a museum was not a priority or even a requirement for the job, Selz went on to acknowledge the support of founding director Alfred Barr. Whereas the final decision was made by director René d'Harnoncourt, it was Barr who first raised the possibility of Selz's fitness for the job. Peter described in a few sentences the qualities that made Barr an art legend as the architect of MoMA's identity and, at the time, clarity of purpose:

 

My first wife [Thalia] said to me . . ., “You always wanted to show you could do this kind of thing”—to have the chance to do it in a place which at that time was much more important than it is now, because it really was the only place, it was
the
place that called the tune. . . . Barr . . . was our mentor. I've had students who are doing all kinds of things now to break down the canon, but he established the canon [the accepted measure of modernist importance based upon French art]. He did all these marvelous things in bringing the different aspects of modernism together in one museum, and we admired that enormously.
⁴

Barr's role in creating what is often erroneously described as the “first” and greatest museum of modern art was huge,
⁵
but he did not accomplish this extraordinary feat on his own. As it happened, he was selected in a seemingly arbitrary manner by three motivated and determined female fans of modern art, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Sullivan. These three New York collectors of modern art, with a shared interest in contemporary American art (Rockefeller had been collecting since the mid-1920s), met while traveling abroad in the winter of
1928–29. Rockefeller and Bliss each were delighted to discover a kindred spirit as they were examining the pyramids in Egypt. Aboard ship on the voyage home, they—and eventually museum history—enjoyed the good fortune of meeting another enthusiast, Sullivan, with whom they bemoaned the lack of a museum in New York devoted to their modernist interests. Back at home these informal conversations continued over tea, culminating in an invitation to Buffalo businessman and art collector A. Conger Goodyear to join them for lunch at Mrs. Rockefeller's home. Unaware of what they had in mind, Goodyear accepted solely to see his hostess's house and art collection. When asked to head a committee to establish the new museum (social protocol indicated a chair
man
), he asked for a week to consider the matter. He accepted the next day.
⁶

Paul Sachs, associate director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, was empowered to find a director for the new museum. In 1929, he shocked the organizing committee by recommending his former student Alfred H. Barr Jr., “a callow and often tactlessly outspoken twenty-seven-year-old professor with less than two years' experience in teaching modern art to Wellesley girls.”
⁷
Barr was reportedly charismatic when he spoke with excitement about art, however, and he impressed Abby Rockefeller in his interview with her. Thus the Museum of Modern Art was launched. A big part of the story was Barr's ability to work with what he referred to as his “adamantines,” the women whose brainchild the museum in fact was. MoMA was not Alfred Barr's inspiration; it was theirs. But he proceeded to take the idea and run, mostly with their support, especially (although not unconditionally) that of Abby Rockefeller.

Over several decades, first as director and later in a curatorial capacity, Barr successfully crafted what MoMA became—and what it was when Peter Selz arrived. Barr, however, had a vision, an administrative style, and curatorial “quirks” that soon began to grate on the museum board. Although beloved by the curatorial staff and over time earning a reputation as the leading museum authority on modern art—some would say the “final word”—Barr managed eventually to alienate the museum board, even his patron Abby Rockefeller, and board chairman Stephen Clark fired him in 1943. Tenacious in the extreme, Barr refused to leave. His one full supporter was James Thrall Soby, appointed assistant director the same year to “further ease Barr's position.” Soby finally
arranged for a small office to be constructed in the library, where Barr could devote himself to researching and writing his long-promised history of modern art. In 1947 Clark partially recanted by appointing Barr director of collections, to be joined in that capacity by his loyal sidekick and trusted collaborator, Dorothy Miller.