Upon his discharge from the army in 1946, Peter set out to identify which university was the best in the country. With the support of the GI Bill he could aim high, and he decided that the top honor went to the University of Chicago. “Chicago had a program more like a European university; you could go straight to the end, sort of catching up [along the way]. . . . It was a wonderful school, the best university, there’s no question about it.”1 Since Peter had completed only one year of undergraduate work at Columbia, this was an important consideration. “I never did get a B.A. degree. Almost from the beginning I worked on a master’s degree and just had to take courses where there were gaps. I tested out of things that I acquired on my own through reading.”2
In making decisions about how to direct his studies, he could look to his friend Kenneth Donahue, who attended the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and, Selz reports, already had a position at Queens College teaching art history. Until he learned of Donahue’s good fortune, Selz had no real idea that a living could be made in art other than by buying and selling it. With this new information, Peter decided he would follow his friend’s example.
Selz describes the faculty at Chicago in glowing terms as composed of “absolutely first-rate people,” starting with his advisor, Ulrich Middeldorf, who remained a mentor over the years and who became director of the German Art Historical Institute in Florence, and also including Peter-Heinrich von Blanckenhagen (classical art) and Otto Georg von Simson (medieval art). Peter went to work in this environment to “catch up.” Then the time came to make the decision that would both draw on his personal past and distinguish him in his newly chosen course. He describes the process:
Looking for a Ph.D. topic, you look for something that hasn’t been done. I saw there were books on Cubism, people had already been working on Surrealism, and I saw this enormous gap. . . . There was this 1919 drypoint self-portrait by Beckmann [Fig. 27], given to me by a friend soon after I first arrived in America, hanging over my desk. I was looking at it all the time. Before the war, in the New York galleries—Neumann, Valentin, and Nierendorf had brought many of these painters to this country—I was looking at the Kirchners and especially Beckmann.3
Peter also singles out the importance of William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1924 to 1945 (he later went on to the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, and elsewhere): “He knew German Expressionism very early, and when he came to America in the twenties he collected their pictures. . . . The Detroit museum was the only museum in the country with a whole room of German Expressionist material.”4
The choice of German Expressionism as a dissertation topic was unusual at the time: “I was in a field that had not been discussed much. I was in America, where modern art was still considered to be French art—until New York took over. . . . My professor, Ulrich Middeldorf, agreed that I write not just a small-subject dissertation, like most are. He said, ‘You know, why don’t you write—nobody’s written about the whole German Expressionist movement.’ I asked, ‘Can I do this for a dissertation?’ And he said, ‘Why not?’ So it became my dissertation.”5
In a field otherwise dominated by connoisseurship (questions of attribution and formal-stylistic considerations), at Chicago students were permitted, even encouraged, to try different approaches to studying art and writing about art history: “Now, in the way that I understood it, at that point I was looking at art history not just in the formal sense. I had been doing that for too long even then. I was relating [art] to the political background of the Wilhelmian era in pre–World War II Germany.”6
With the benefit of hindsight, Selz now considers that contextual approach and his recognition of the relationship of abstraction to emotional (empathetic) qualities of expressionist art as advanced for the time. His explanation of how he arrived at that approach is enlightening in terms of reconfiguring thinking about art, and it is instructive in the way it drew upon an existing reservoir of theoretical writing. Selz’s approach, despite its freshness, seems to have been greatly influenced by German scholarship, notably that of Alois Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer, and especially Hermann Bahr, which provided a basis for expressionist theory: “That was very unusual and rather ahead of its time. But I realized in order to deal with German Expressionism [one must recognize] the move toward abstraction—or rather the abstract-based [style] in which Kirchner painted the human figure—and then to full abstract expressionism in Kandinsky and the Munich Blaue Reiter. I wondered where these ideas came from.”7
During this time Selz was fortunate in the arrival at Chicago in 1950 of Joshua Taylor, just out of Princeton, who took over as his dissertation advisor. Taylor was a preeminent scholar of late-nineteenth-century and modern American art who, like Selz, became known for looking well beyond the mainstream. But regardless of the academic process involved and guidance provided, Selz conceived and, in 1954, produced one of the first two dissertations on twentieth-century art written up to that time.8 Not only did he develop an important dissertation topic but, shortly thereafter, he published a career-making book as well—German Expressionist Painting (1957): “I became interested in the theory of abstraction, ideas leading to the book. Despite some needed corrections in the opening chapter about theory, if you look at it now, it does seem rather ahead of its time.”9 Selz was referring to his book, but if the book was, as he says, ahead of its time, the dissertation was even more so.
Peter’s personal life was developing in a way that contributed to the direction of his career perhaps as much as his doctoral work did. He met Thalia Cheronis, an art history graduate of Oberlin College, at an art department tea. She was enrolled in the university’s master’s program in English literature. In 1948 they married, becoming intellectual as well as wedded partners. Both received their M.A. degrees a year later, and Peter immediately started teaching. Along the way, frequent visits with Peter’s brother, Edgar, and his family (wife Trudy and son Thomas) in nearby Evanston were an important part of their nonacademic life, although time for such familial pleasures was limited by the couple’s work schedules.
In fact, Peter had two part-time positions teaching art history. One was at the Chicago extension branch of the University of Illinois (later called the Chicago Circle campus, and now the University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC). The other job was, as he says, much more interesting and “very, very important.” That is not to say that his position was so important—he was teaching a basic art history survey course and modern art—but the place definitely was, especially for a young scholar embarking on a career as a modern art specialist at a time when the field was brand new:
I taught at the Institute of Design—with an interruption of a Fulbright in Paris [accompanied by Thalia]—from 1949 until I left Chicago in 1955. . . . That’s when I got totally involved in modern art, with a great faculty. [László] Moholy-[Nagy] was gone—he was already dead—but there were all these others. [Architect Serge] Chermayeff— recommended by Gropius—was director, and some of the best people, Europeans and Americans, came and went. The students . . . came from all over with the specific purpose of being at this place and at this time. It created all sorts of problems . . . we were fighting all the time because we thought this was the most important art school in the world. This was the New Bauhaus; this was where everything was happening.10
In light of his interest in emotionalism and empathy, it would seem that the Bauhaus precepts and the design and architecture focus of the classes at the Institute of Design would have been at odds with what appealed to Selz within the German Expressionist aesthetic and the making of an individualist creative life. But at the Institute he found an echo of what he had experienced in Munich and then in New York with the Werkleute emphasis on group activity, socialist communalism, and utopian ideals. He described his participation in the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum with a combination of pride and excitement: “The first two years were very much like the foundation course at the Bauhaus: introduction to form creation, color, texture . . . then students went into different fields: product design, graphic design, photography, or architecture. In photography alone there were people like Harry Callahan, who was head of the department; Aaron Siskind and Art Sinsabaugh were teaching there. I think photography was one of the best parts of the Institute of Design. But also the graphic designers—the Institute changed American graphic design. The feeling was definitely that this was the significant place.”11
The “interruption” of the Fulbright sojourn in Paris in 1949–50, however, helped Peter find his own personal understanding of and relationship to modernist art. To this day he delights in telling how his Fulbright research differed from that of several of his counterparts in Paris. It was as if he and he alone discovered what mattered, how you get close to the secrets of art and the creative life by embracing contemporary art and artists, the makers. And that was not to be accomplished by reading books:
I had finished my master’s in German Expressionism, but since I was in France I studied postwar French painting—what was going on right then and there. That was very exciting. Paris was wonderful in ’49 and ’50, all the things happening. . . . There were a couple of other Fulbrights in Paris, spending their time in the archives and the libraries while I was spending my time in the galleries, cafes, and the studios. I had much more fun. Having come from the ID, which was really the most advanced place in art education and the whole concept of new design and architecture, I felt very much at home working with contemporary material.12
But Selz later acknowledged the gap between his own artistic interests and the formalist style and design preoccupation of the Institute. By the time he and Thalia had returned from his Fulbright year in Paris, his attention had shifted markedly to a very different group of artists. Part of the impetus was the discovery of Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, both very influential in the formation of his views and his attraction to particular forms of artistic expression.
Nonetheless, Peter maintained his interest in his German Expressionist subjects, meeting several of them during his European sojourn: “In the early days [of the Fulbright trip], when I was in Germany, I met the people who were still around. There was [Karl] Schmidt-Rottluff, [Erich] Heckel, and then later I met George Grosz—although he was not really an Expressionist.” He visited Schmidt-Rottluff in his studio in Berlin and Heckel in Hemmenhofen and Lake Constance: “Both had remained in Germany during the Nazi period, when they were prohibited from showing their work. They were in what the Germans liked to call ‘inner emigration.’ Both painters talked about their early Brücke work and were very pleased to see this interest from an American.”13
In 1949 in Chicago, Peter had met Max Beckmann and his wife, Quappi. “They took me to tea in a hotel restaurant, and Beckmann seemed interested to talk about the Institute of Design (Moholy’s new Bauhaus), where I was teaching at the time.” Although “I didn’t think of him as an Expressionist either . . ., I realized rather early on that he was the giant of the artists coming out of this group, and I still think he’s one of the major artists of the century.”14
Upon the return to Chicago, Peter was eager to get back to work on his dissertation and to resume study of the German modernists. Nonetheless, his experiences in Paris—Left Bank life and the pleasant hours spent in bistros and cafés with artists—reinforced his desire not only to study the bohemian art life but to actually try to live it, a tendency of identifying with his artist subjects that began to set him apart from the majority of his colleagues. Peter and Thalia had even thought about extending the Fulbright stay in Paris, but both academic and economic considerations prevailed.
Back in Chicago, both Peter and Thalia had jobs at the Institute of Design. Thalia taught a film history course, and Peter was teaching full time as well as developing a graduate program in art education, which he ran until he left Chicago in 1955. However, he was becoming dissatisfied with the Institute. His experiences in France and with the artists he became acquainted with there, his reimmersion in the expressionism of his Ph.D. topic, and his concurrent involvement with Chicago contemporary art and a group of “rebellious” young artists called Exhibition Momentum soon cast the school in a new and unappealing light. His earlier enthusiasm waned along with the fortunes of the Institute itself.
Selz describes those years as critical in the formation of his career, for they allowed him to identify the qualities he felt were most significant and meaningful in terms of creative activity. Writing in 1996 in an essay titled “Modernism Comes to Chicago,” he looked back at those years, and particularly at the history of the Institute of Design, and concluded with a declaration of what he most valued in the contemporary Chicago scene. At least in retrospect, he championed the working local artists over the declining academic design school that paid his salary: “When one thinks of the Chicago artists of the postwar period, it is the idiosyncratic Imagists, once mislabeled the ‘Monster Roster,’ that come to mind, [among them] Leon Golub, H. C. Westermann, Irving Petlin. And then we think of their successors, The Hairy Who, The False Image, and The Non-Plussed groups and later individuals, such as Ed Paschke, whose expressions, fashions, and often raunchy vitality relate to the Second City in a manner forming a significant contrast to the utopian optimism of the Bauhaus tradition as exemplified in the Institute of Design.”15
Elsewhere, when explaining what attracted him to German Expressionism, Selz goes on to discuss personal art tastes and interests that inform his own work—exhibitions, essays, books, reviews—throughout his professional life:
I guess it was the vitality of the art—the emotional, the anti-formalist, the anti-Bauhaus quality of the art. These two things were very closely related . . . my interest in German Expressionism and my contact with the Momentum artists in Chicago. This was a give and take, because they learned from what I had to tell them about German art. I was one of two non-artists in the group [the other was architectural historian Franz Schulze]. They had big exhibitions every year and brought important jurors. This is how I first met Jackson Pollock, Alfred Barr, and even old guys like Max Weber. All these people were brought every year, three of them, to jury the shows. They were regional shows of this Midwestern avantgarde, and that’s where I met a lot of artists.16
Selz’s natural position was aligned with the individual and the subjective, rather than the communal and the objective (pragmatic, social). This aesthetic led him to many artists who operated independently and who certainly would not fit in with the Bauhaus idea of a utopian art designed to transform society. A good example is the selection of artists for the University of Chicago’s 1947 exhibition of contemporary Chicago art, an early demonstration of Selz’s strong inclination to look beyond the New York art world.17 This exhibition, an innovative effort by the Student Committee (of which Peter was chair) of the Renaissance Society in which students selected the artists who then submitted works, received favorable attention in the local press. A review by Frank Holland described it as presenting “a more balanced and true representation of local art than is achieved by the Art Institute’s annual.”18 At the opening on July 11, S. I. Hayakawa gave a lecture titled “The Semantics of Modern Art.” The sophistication of this program no doubt reflects upon the committee chairman’s knowledge of modernism, but it also is a reminder of the intellectual climate and resources at the University of Chicago.
Selz’s attention was more and more being directed to Leon Golub and the artists of the Exhibition Momentum group—among them George Cohen, June Leaf, Cosmo Campoli, and Ray Fink. These artists, some from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), others from the Institute of Design, many with opposing views, were however united in their response to the SAIC’s decision to exclude students from its juried annual exhibition of works by artists from Chicago and vicinity. They mounted their own annual exhibitions, which in Peter’s judgment were better than those at the Art Institute. Though they did not have a unified style, they were working from the human image. The expressionist figuration that characterized much of their work drew him to them much as he had been drawn to German Expressionism.
While looking closely at Chicago artists, Selz also reestablished connections with contemporary New York art, making discoveries that countered some of his earlier convictions:
Around 1950 . . . I knew what was going on in Chicago. I read ArtNews and also knew what was going on in New York. I went there and began to meet some of the artists. The first one I met was Ad Reinhardt, and that became a lifelong friendship. That was very important. . . . Why? Because there was somebody who had altogether new ideas. He hated [Abstract] Expressionism. . . . So, I began to see and learn and meet people, and I think he [Reinhardt] was my prime contact with the New York school. But I also began to have contact with the New York museum people, dealers, and artists while I was in Chicago. And being at the Institute of Design itself was important because of the people coming through. There was this constant give and take also between [the ID and] the other Bauhaus, Black Mountain [College, in North Carolina]—people like [Josef] Albers, [Herbert] Bayer, Bucky Fuller, and many of the old Bauhaus people came by.19
Now finished with his dissertation and growing increasingly disenchanted with the Institute of Design, Peter began putting out feelers for another position. But, as he observed, “jobs were still hard to find in the mid-1950s.”20
Selz attributes the decline of ID to a lack of purpose: “The brilliant old place, really the whole Bauhaus idea, was falling apart. . . . It was an ingrown place. . . . In a way the purpose was no longer quite there. It had been achieved. . . . Modern design had been accepted.”21 Later, however, as he began to develop a broader and more inclusive understanding of modernism, he softened his negative view of the Institute of Design, arriving at a more balanced idea of the complexity and diverse component parts of modernism: “Eventually I more or less took a historic view. I also began to see the connections [with] the Expressionists—after all, the Bauhaus started as an expressionist thing and then later moved in a different direction—and I met [Walter] Gropius and [Ludwig] Mies [van der Rohe} and all those people.”22
The cash-strapped ID was soon to be absorbed by the Illinois Institute of Technology, pretty well destroying its once fabled reputation as the great center for modern art. According to Selz, everybody was trying to get out—including him.
Then fate stepped in. In 1954 at the annual College Art Association conference he presented a paper on Herwarth Walden, the great modern art impresario of Berlin. As Peter remembers it, the paper was well received. And fortuitously, art historian Richard Krautheimer was in the audience. At about the same time, Pomona College, one of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, had launched a search for a new chairman because Seymour Slive (who had come from Chicago) was leaving to go to Harvard. “The president, E. Wilson Lyon, did the right thing,” Peter recalls, “and went to the Institute of Fine Arts [New York University], asking Krautheimer whom he might suggest: ‘I heard this very good paper by this young man from Chicago.’ So it was through Krautheimer’s recommendation that I was offered the Pomona job [as art department chair and director of the gallery].”23 Selz at that point was delighted to leave Chicago. “California seemed wonderful and Pomona College was very good.”24
Why was California “wonderful”? At that time, a successful career either in teaching art history or in museum work was unimaginable outside the northeastern seaboard. Why would Selz, at least in his retrospective telling of it, embrace what must have seemed like something of an exile from the “serious” American art world, within the narrowly focused field of art history? Even then he saw his own pattern developing, the most significant aspect of which was openness to the new—modernist art, alive and constantly changing. So although many might have questioned the professional advisability of a move to California, Peter apparently saw it as an opportunity. Besides, he and Thalia had now been married for seven years, and he desperately needed a better job.
Perhaps he was simply grateful for a job at a very good liberal arts college nestled away among palm trees and orange groves, but in fact the three years at Pomona prepared Selz for his role as a distinguished thinker about art and the originator of provocative exhibitions. His personal experience of regional American art, when added to his appreciation of the unusual and original in European art, enabled him to create a fresh vision of the course of modernism.
• • •
Pomona was important for Selz in several ways. For one, he was able to leave the deteriorating situation at Chicago’s Institute of Design for an idyllic college campus that, though set in the sunny environment of Southern California, looked and felt as if it had been transplanted from the northeastern private-college preserve. Tree-lined streets surrounded and penetrated the leafy campus with its year-round grassy quadrangles and vine-covered buildings. At the time, it was known as the “Oxford of the Orange Belt.” As Peter said approvingly, “Pomona was a nice college, academically strong, and people got along very well. It was a calm place and we had good students.”25
Among the young people Selz encountered on arrival in Pomona were two studio art students, undeniably talented, who met at the college, married, and went on to become successful and admired artists in Seattle. For Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, Peter was both teacher and mentor, and the three remain friends to this day.
Peter played a central role in inspiring Michael to remain at Pomona when he was about to give it up in his freshman year. “When I was pissing and moaning about school,” Michael recalls, “he just said, ‘Well, I don’t particularly like it here either, but if you stay a year, then I will.’ I still don’t know if he meant it or not, or if he just was encouraging me to stay.”26
Michael and Elizabeth recalled the excitement generated by the faculty at Pomona, with Peter playing a central role in their shared memories: “Peter would often hang out with the students. He wasn’t trying to be young or anything, just curious about how the students were responding to their education.” But finally, what seems to distinguish Peter from his colleagues was an almost unique quality—that of not just appreciating artists, but to a degree being one himself. According to Michael, “He was different . . . with this ability to size up the situation and become part of it. He was able to empathize with great energy. I think a lot of the students benefited from this.” To which Elizabeth added: “It was his energy. When he gave a lecture, he wasn’t exactly giving a lecture. He moved all around the room. And he talked and he waved his arms around.”27
Sandvig and Spafford were attracted and moved by the emotion Selz brought to his subject matter in inspirational lectures. But what equally impressed them is that he extended that excitement about art and ideas beyond the classroom. He did not simply theorize about art in an academic way; he applied artistic ideas and an aesthetic view of the world to his own life. At Pomona, the artistic—the “bohemian”—behavior was already in evidence, according to Michael: “Sure, at Pomona he was gregarious. And there are all kinds of stories about things that he did at parties. I don’t know if they’re true or not—but very often they were outrageous. It’s sort of like the kind of behavior you’d expect from an artist rather than an art historian. And I feel that that really made his art history come alive, that he really empathized with the artists—as well as the times and the people that he was talking to.”28 Michael put a positive, philosophical spin on Selz’s “outrageous” behavior by invoking artistic license, supposedly granted by the romantic myth of creative exceptionalism: “I think that Peter did not want to call attention to himself, but more to the situation. He’d be a great performance artist. He’d probably be a great painter too. If he wants to do it, tell him I’ll loan him the paint.”29
Peter Selz’s political views were also evident to his more perceptive students. Sandvig and Spafford agree that he was not as deeply, or at least as actively, involved in liberal causes at Pomona as his friend the anthropologist Charles Leslie was, but “Peter would explode on an issue, and then he’d find something else to explode about.”30 In fact, this political consciousness, which was already an important component in Peter’s private life and which he eventually understood to be a central purpose of art, was something his friends the Leslies could speak to.
Charles and Peter had both been at the University of Chicago— though they had known each other only slightly there—and had both been involved in left-wing politics, including active participation in the socialist veterans’ group AVC (American Veterans Committee), which, according to Charles, the Stalinists were always trying to take over. Charles considered himself more politically engaged than Peter,31 and that view was shared by Michael Spafford at Pomona, though he characterized Peter as “more passionate” in his views and causes.32
In Pomona, however, what mattered more than politics for Peter and Thalia and for Charles and his wife, Zelda, was the small-town experience and an active social life. The intellectual-bohemian qualities of these deliciously unconventional faculty couples attracted and intrigued the students. Sandvig and Spafford recall seeking to emulate their professors in both erudition and lifestyle, and Elizabeth remembers the women’s creative manner of dress, which set them apart from other faculty wives.
In Peter’s accounts of his days at Pomona, the Leslies, who lived just down the block, play a role in happy memories. It was here, too, that the Selzes enjoyed what Peter now regards as the most satisfying chapter of his domestic life. Their two daughters were born in Pomona: Tanya in early 1957, and Gabrielle (Gaby) in the summer of 1958. Charles and Zelda’s reminiscences of those days—and of Peter and Thalia—are warm and generous. Zelda recalls Thalia giving her one of her maternity dresses to wear to the college president’s dinner dance. They fondly think of her as a “sweet, loving person,” an intelligent and talented writer whose ambitions, however, were frustrated by the demands of family life combined with her teaching an English class at Pomona.33 It is easy to see how, certainly for young couples like Spafford and Sandvig, these four were attractive marital role models.
• • •
The only serious objection Peter had to Pomona and Southern California, from the evidence of his interviews, was the presence at Scripps College of Millard Sheets, with his ultrareactionary art views. This is a harsh judgment, but Sheets’s great influence in the region—partly due to his connection to savings and loan mogul and art patron Howard Ahmanson— and his very traditional posture assured a collision course with Peter Selz. The progressive, international art perspective that Selz represented was anathema to Sheets, and to much of the Southern California art community. Peter, meanwhile, was unsparing in his denunciation of the narrow and fundamentally “anti-art” influence of Sheets: “The problem in Claremont was . . . Millard Sheets. He had established a great art empire at Scripps College . . . and he was totally opposed to the two things that I stood for: art history—he hated art historians—and modern art, which he also hated violently. So this was the situation at Claremont and the Los Angeles area. Sheets hated me and tried to get me out. He had enormous power in Southern California, but Pomona College was an older institution than Scripps, and he couldn’t do much.”34
Peter also objected to Sheets’s deplorable taste in architecture, which, according to Peter, Sheets was determined to impose upon the Claremont Colleges during a major building program. In fact, Sheets reached farther. He was a part of a faction that was against the establishment of a separate identity for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “He tried to demolish that. Later on, of course, he wanted to have the design himself, and this was a big problem . . . when [Richard (Rick) Brown, who had risen to directorship of LACMA] wanted Mies [van der Rohe] to do it.” Howard Ahmanson, who established Home Savings and was the great benefactor of Sheets, was on the board of the museum; Brown’s rejection of Sheets caused a “big problem.”
More important to Peter, however, was what he saw as attempts by Sheets to dictatorially impose on students a single (and retardataire) view of art by executive order: “Sheets’s [impact] was really devastating. At that time many of the Pomona students also took classes at Scripps, where [the teachers] had an extraordinary antagonism against modern art which was left over from the thirties. We were doing a lot of modern art shows at Pomona [see Fig. 12], and the students were actually told not to go, not to see the shows.”35
The battle lines were drawn between traditionalism (not just abstraction) and modernism, and the newcomer Selz found himself not just on the front line, but the leader of the progressive forces arrayed against what was perceived as the Sheets-led reactionary art establishment. In fairness, some of the students who later established themselves as professional artists remember the situation as being less severe. According to sculptor Jack Zajac, for example, Sheets did not actively discourage students from seeing Selz’s exhibitions.36
In 1956, Selz and several others—including Rick Brown, who was chief curator of what was then the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art—joined together to counter the conservative forces in Southern California, calling themselves the Southern California Art Historians. This group brought a new sense of professionalism to the teaching of art history in the area. There quite simply was nothing like it before in Southern California. Other members were Peter’s friends at UC Riverside, Bates Lowry, Jean Boggs, and Carl Sheppard. Also in the early group were Donald Goodall (University of Southern California) and Karl With and Ralph Altman (UCLA). They were later joined by Karl Birkmeyer and Frederick Wight, along with Kate Steinitz (mother of Peter’s Werkleute friend Batz), all also from UCLA. “A very, very nice group,” Selz approvingly called it.37
When asked how and why the professional organization came together, Selz responded that it was to give papers, share ideas with colleagues, and try to establish art history in the area: “Art history had never been established in Southern California. For many years we were the only ones teaching there . . . [the idea] was to create a foundation and help each other out, to do things together, like exhibitions. I had some very nice ones at Pomona. One of the first was devoted to Pasadena’s legendary [Arts and Crafts architects the] Greene brothers—the first Greene and Greene show.”38
Peter arrived in Pomona with his trademark enthusiasm for art and artists, a great curiosity about what was going on around him, lack of prejudice, and the kind of mind that favored the overlooked and nonmainstream work of innovators. And he absolutely left behind the typical New York self-consciousness that by that time all but defined the art world.
He put his enthusiasms and ideas to work immediately, giving them visibility at the college through an innovative and highly informed series of small exhibitions. Nothing comparable had taken place in Southern California, especially in Claremont where Millard Sheets’s conservativism still held sway. As Michael Spafford recalled, “Peter brought the Golub show, which was a huge turn-on for me. It was a real powerful exhibit because it had all the energy of abstract painting, and yet it was figurative also. . . . Peter really responded to that kind of work.”39
Peter takes justifiable pride in what he accomplished at Pomona, where he transformed the small gallery exhibition program and established his legacy in Southern California. Later, in an interview for the Museum of Modern Art’s Oral History Project, he described without false modesty these early accomplishments, focusing first—as would be expected—on his exhibitions and his rapid immersion in the local art scene:
I did shows and I ran the art department. I had a small budget and did exhibitions, starting with Toulouse-Lautrec posters. I did all kinds of interesting exhibitions. At the same time I rewrote my dissertation into the German Expressionism book published by the University of California Press. There was a lot happening out in Los Angeles, and I became very much a part of it. . . . All these exciting painters—like Wally Berman—became especially interesting to me. The show I hoped to do was the Ferus Gallery group. Robert Irwin was a part of that. [Eventually the group included Ed Kienholz, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Ed Ruscha, and, briefly, Llyn Foulkes.] But then I also found out that there was one unique thing [geometric abstraction] going on in L.A., which was very different from the Abstract Expressionism . . . everybody else was doing.40
As much as he liked the college environment, Selz was not satisfied to limit himself to Pomona. He correctly sensed that there must be more to Southern California than peaceful campus life. Unlike most of his colleagues, who took pride in traveling more often to London than to Los Angeles, which they disdained as a cultural wasteland, he regularly made his way to the few galleries and various art events spread from downtown across Hollywood to what is now referred to as the West Side. He became proficient in navigating the early freeways and surface streets over the thirty to forty miles required to get him to his spread-out destinations. Behind the wheel of his blue 1952 Studebaker, acquired in Chicago and driven west, he motored along the existing stretches of freeway that were beginning to connect the far-flung communities of mid-1950s Los Angeles. His route from Pomona took him along the partially completed Foothill Freeway, which connected to Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco Parkway, the first such urban highway in the country.41
In addition to the galleries along La Cienega Boulevard and in Beverly Hills—the most interesting of which to him were Felix Landau, Frank Perls, and Paul Kantor (among the relatively few important Los Angeles dealers and, as in New York, Jewish immigrants)—Selz was drawn to the new music scene as well as the classical concerts presented by the unparalleled community of refugee composers and musicians living in Los Angeles. With his faculty artist friends James Grant and Frederick Hammersley, he often attended the Monday Evening Concerts in West Hollywood. Another of Peter’s friends, Austrian-born avantgarde composer Karl Kohn, pianist and professor of music at Pomona, was on the board of directors of this concert series. The Monday Evening Concerts were the extended legacy of “Evenings on the Roof,” founded in 1939 by music writer Peter Yates and his pianist wife, Frances Mullen, in the rooftop studio of their Schindler-designed home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Their historic programs now loom large in the history of advanced serious music. Among the names associated with the concerts—immensely popular with the displaced population trying to maintain some connection to European high culture—were immigrants Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Lukas Foss, as well as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage. The serious music world of Los Angeles was, largely by a tragedy of history, for a brief period unequaled elsewhere.42 Peter Selz and his friends were in the audience of the continuation of this important development in twentieth-century music history. He was the visual arts modernist on the West Coast at the time, but he typically looked beyond his own field to seek out the other expressions of the modernist vision, continuing his natural habit of seeking the company of the most creative people among his colleagues.
Selz’s most important contribution in Southern California was his recognition of what became known as Hard Edge painting. The term was originated during the early planning of the Four Abstract Classicists exhibition that Peter initiated for Pomona but that, with his departure for New York, went to the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art in 1959. Peter recognizes the significance of the show and the counteraesthetic represented by the featured artists, whose innovations, especially in the case of John McLaughlin, still have not been adequately acknowledged in American art history. Seeking to clarify the circumstances surrounding this pioneering exhibition, Selz begins,
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.