Covering a 1960 appearance by Peter Selz at the Detroit Institute of Arts, local art editor Louise Bruner gave an account of the evening that suggests both the casual informality of such events in the early 1960s and the speaker’s awareness of his role in the art world: “After a few introductory remarks about the forthcoming Futurist show he is organizing, which will come to Detroit, Dr. Selz lit a cigarette, leaned on the podium, took a sip from his highball and answered questions from the audience. The first, from me: ‘Does the Museum of Modern Art create taste because of its great influence, or does it guide and reflect taste?’ Dr. Selz: ‘It is regrettable but unavoidable that we create taste. We are conscious of this responsibility and try to be diversified.’” Bruner described the curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art as, “by virtue of this position alone, . . . one of the high priests of contemporary American and international art.”1
The 1960s, however, brought a dramatic change to the art world, most notably in New York and specifically at the Museum of Modern Art and the commercial galleries, which were forging an ever closer relationship. Despite Selz’s comment quoted above, and a similar assertion by Alfred Barr, the museum’s hitherto undisputed position as trendsetter had begun to decline as early as 1950.2 The emergence of a generation of artists who questioned what was left for them—where they could go with their own art after Abstract Expressionism—is meticulously described in Jed Perl’s 2005 book, New Art City.3 It is difficult to trace all the forces at work. There was a shift from the individualistic and romantic art projects typical of the 1950s and earlier to a more cerebral and structural approach to art making. And there were new relationships between artists, critics, curators, and, especially, dealers. Peter Selz watched with disapproval as this change occurred, and he was more than willing to speak out on the subject. The qualities that he valued in artists and in their creations were, in his view, being replaced by a cynical, superficial, “boomtown” mentality. Even Perl is unable to say just how the change came about and in what venues it was recognized as something ominous for the future of American art. According to his account, everything was simply new and exciting. In fact, it was exciting, and it was important precisely because it was new.
Smitten collectors, most notably New Yorkers Robert and Ethel Scull, did their part to establish a commercial base for the new art. As the prices for contemporary art rose dramatically, museums such as MoMA (in part due to Barr’s reluctance to embrace the so-called cutting edge) were increasingly left behind. Reviewer Fred Kaplan described the Scull enterprise in 2010: “A half century ago, before the phrase ‘Pop Art’ was even coined . . . Robert C. Scull started buying up dozens of works by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. . . . As much as anyone, Mr. Scull and his wife, Ethel—a fashion plate and socialite whom everyone called Spike—created the market for Pop, making it the occasion for lavish parties, an emblem of high society and the new face [italics added] of art in the 1960s.”4
Critic Sidney Tillim, who started writing about Pop Art as early as 1962, before its “formal debut,” faults the Museum of Modern Art for falling behind.5 He does so, moreover, in a way that calls into question the museum’s understanding of American contemporary art in general, its “internationalist preoccupation,” and what he refers to as “crisis” aesthetics that led to an exaggerated focus on the figure (presumably including New Images of Man in that judgment). The French art foundation of Barr’s modernist canon, along with the Peter Selz–Dorothy Miller figurative emphasis (though it was not a shared perspective), is in effect challenged by Tillim as indicating MoMA’s increasing irrelevancy in connection with current art. In 1965, he wrote that the museum’s “exploitation of Optical Art as an alternative to Pop has to be considered.” He was responding in part to John Canaday, who in the New York Times described Optical Art as the art of our time:6 Tillim acknowledged that MoMA may have recovered some lost prestige through the Optical Art show The Responsive Eye, “organized by William Seitz . . . [and] conceived for the purposes of counteracting the popularity of Pop Art, [but] it did illustrate the difficulty the curatorial Establishment has had in approaching modernist art with anything but an international bias.”7 This hardly seems fair in light of the catholicity of the exhibitions produced in Selz’s department up to that very year.
Tillim’s article goes beyond the Pop phenomenon, however, to point out a general deficiency in MoMA’s relationship to contemporary American art. Although he credits MoMA for a series of “informative” exhibitions about American art—“Indian painting, photography, and even George Caleb Bingham”—these shows, he charged, nevertheless demonstrated a fundamentally parochial attitude toward American art that “seems to persist to this day”:
It is only in the last few years that the Abstract Expressionists have been honored. But among the first of these was Mark Tobey, who can hardly be described as typical; and besides, the present series of retrospectives seems curiously belated. In the thirties and forties there may have been some justification for the Museum’s intransigence. . . . The problem is that the Museum has been ambivalent on the one hand, and aggressive on the other, and has retarded the development of indigenous sensibility by constantly relating art in America to values that over the years have applied less and less to the problems whose issue now simply repudiates what the Museum down deep still thinks is the mainstream.8
By virtue of his position at MoMA, Peter Selz was able to observe firsthand what turned out to be fundamental structural, ideological, aesthetic, intellectual, and commercial changes in the art world. Previously accepted values of art, including the sense that art could contain profound meaning and even transformative power, were themselves transforming under the “weight” of the ephemeral and transitory. Peter, whose career was built on the belief that form and content together served a serious goal, one not touched by a passing parade of “isms,” did not like what he saw. And he was wary of art history and criticism leading the way for art; rather, their duty was to follow, observe closely, describe, and, when possible, explain. Everything, for Peter, started with the art and the artist.
The curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, sympathetic to what was going on in New York and particularly receptive to Pop Art, put his finger directly on the fundamental shift in power and influence in the art world. The lead in the art dance, he noted, moved rapidly back and forth between critic/historian and artist, with the museums and galleries watching and waiting to pick winners and then moving in:
We are still working with myths developed in the age of alienation . . . [but] there no longer is any shock in art. About a year and a half ago [1961] I saw the work of Wesselmann, Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein in their studios. They were working independently, unaware of each other, but with a common source of imagery. Within that year and a half they have had shows, been dubbed a movement, and we are discussing them at a symposium. This is instant art history, art history made so aware of itself that it leaps to get ahead of art.9
The conservative critic Hilton Kramer, though hardly in the same camp as Geldzahler, echoed this point with the observation that “the relation of the critic to his material has been significantly reversed. Critics are now free to confront a class of objects . . . about which almost anything [they] say will engage the mind more fully and affect the emotions more subtly than the objects whose meaning they are ostensibly elucidating.”10
Geldzahler and Kramer were speakers (along with Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz) at the Museum of Modern Art symposium on Pop Art organized and moderated by Peter Selz. (In the audience was Marcel Duchamp, who reportedly commented that Kramer was “insufficiently light-hearted.”)11 The symposium was held on 13 December 1962, six weeks after Sidney Janis opened his New Realists exhibition, a survey of contemporary Pop Art. According to Thomas Hess in his Art News review, “The point of the Janis show . . . was an implicit proclamation that the New had arrived and it was time for all the old fogies to pack.”12 Selz was no fan of Pop Art, and few of the other panelists, with the exception of Geldzahler, were favorably disposed toward the new movement. But the art fashion tide picked up Pop and swept aside the unbelievers, the “old fogies” who’d been brought up in what might as well have been a different era.
Selz had been particularly vocal in his criticism. Writing in Partisan Review, he dismissed the new movement by accusing it of being “as easy to consume as it is to produce and, better yet, easy to market because it is loud, it is clean, and you can be fashionable and at the same time know what you are looking at.”13 According to Selz, Pop Art was a product of American consumerism and drew its subjects directly from that source in a kind of circular process. He missed the evidence of engagement and suffering that informed the great modern art of the recent past, such as German Expressionism. For him, the new art operated exclusively on the surface; it was both literally and figuratively devoid of depth.
The issue of surface versus depth was of great significance to Selz. He claimed to be open to the new, regardless of style, but if subjectivity and human qualities were removed, he had little use for what was left. A 2009 article by Richard Dorment in the New York Review of Books tackles that issue head on in a discussion of three recent books about Andy Warhol.14 The essay discusses what constitutes an original work of art by asking to what extent the artist’s hand need be evident or even required in its production. Warhol’s fame, of course, is indebted to the Duchampian tenet that art exists not in the execution, but in the idea. How the object is manufactured or even if it is mass-produced (appropriate terms in connection with Warhol) is beside the point.
This subversive view of authorship and handcrafted originality remains highly offensive to traditionalists. At best, they would hold, it smacks more of philosophy than of art. In fact, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto seems to agree when he describes Warhol as “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.”15 According to one of the assistants responsible for painting many of Warhol’s later works, the artist’s primary role was signing them when they were sold. A painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether or not he ever touched it.16
This practice alone could be taken as a fundamentally cynical view of fine art, and many observers at the time did so. But that was not what Selz objected to most. Rather, it was the attitude that art had no life, no passion—no humanity—breathing beneath the surface, eagerly waiting to emerge and affect the viewer. As Warhol famously said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”17 Influential though this erasure of the artist became in aspects of postmodern thinking, this notion was antithetical to Selz’s humanistic approach to art. And it pretty much precluded any true détente between Selz and one rising current of contemporary art and cultural criticism.
In our 1982 interview, Peter had very little good to say about the situation in New York prior to his departure for California. Above all, he deplored the cozy commercial relationships between artists, curators, galleries, and, finally, museums. There was a new way of creating reputations that fueled the art market, serving the immediate interests of every part of the art scene—except the art itself. Everyone was involved in a kind of new art “world order” in this New Art City.
What is happening is, a new kind of merchandise is being offered. I think the whole thing started with Pop Art and its sales pitch. Now, there are things in Pop that I find fascinating. I think Oldenburg is a great artist, as is George Segal. There are things in Realism, especially somebody like Chuck Close, which I also admire. But by and large, what you had in the beginning of Pop was a gallery-oriented art. It became very obvious what Lichtenstein was doing—he was enlarging a comic strip into gallery scale; and Rosenquist, diminishing the billboards he had been doing to gallery scale. So you suddenly had a gallery kind of art which could be sold and has been sold at very, very high prices. Then museums, of course, take part in all this—they can’t neglect it. But I feel that to a great extent it’s done by dealers . . . which is one reason why I was perfectly happy to leave New York when all this happened.18
As Peter talked about the new and powerful role of the art market in New York at this time, he shifted his attention to the commercial aspects of rediscovering the art of the past. He recalled San Francisco writer and critic Alfred Frankenstein’s asserting “more than once” that before historic American art was valued by the market, it received little attention in art history departments in this country’s colleges and universities. Then, as interest caught on and prices went up, voilà: American art was being taught about on American campuses. Selz pointed to two illustrations of contrary developments deriving from this market-driven “discovery” phenomenon. One was the great increase in value of Thomas Eakins photographs as the artist began to be recognized—justifiably, in Selz’s view—not merely as a great American realist painter but as a “major figure of the nineteenth century.”19 In contrast, he disapproved of the parallel situation in which the works of minor American Impressionists (Impressionism was never very good in America, in his view) suddenly became extremely high priced.
Turning to realism and the figure, Selz compared his New Images of Man, involving art that deals with personal feeling, to The New Realism, which at the time of the interview (1982) was on view at the Oakland Museum and which he considered for the most part “appalling.”20 He explained why he felt that way in a statement that eloquently reiterates his fundamental position on the subject of realism. To erroneously group artists together under that convenient rubric, he insists, entirely misses individual differences, including artistic goals, thereby obscuring the very meaning of the work:
To my mind, the most important painting in America in the past decade is the last work of Philip Guston. But I wouldn’t call that realist. This is the kind of humanist figuration, human image feeling . . . that relates to our world, our life. Guston was the only one of the Abstract Expressionist generation who reached a great style in his old age, who painted pictures which are absolutely astonishing. Or the kind of figuration that [R. B.] Kitaj and Jim Dine have done, very different from Guston but also extraordinary. The other kind, most of the Photo-Realism, is tour-de-force painting—it shows what a painter can do by using photographs. But once you get over the fact—“my god, isn’t it remarkable how he managed to do this”—it isn’t all that exciting.21
What Selz wants in art is subjectivity and metaphor. He never was interested in simple realistic rendition, whether academic nudes by William Adolphe Bouguereau or soup cans by Warhol. He acknowledges that dealing with photography has a point, but not enough of a point to engage his interest. As he warms to his subject, Peter’s efforts to convey his personal critical/historical perspective, referring to certain favorite artists, become both more urgent and more eloquent. The eagerness to convince an audience reveals the passion he brings to his work:
Kitaj comes out of a collage tradition which deals with film and what Germans like [George] Grosz and [John] Heartfield were doing, with what the English were doing at the beginning of English Pop—but he’s bringing it into the context of American consciousness. He deals with a complexity of issues: reality, history, poetry, and the whole history of art (of which he’s totally aware). . . . And when I look at these complex paintings and try to figure them out, at the same time they have an extraordinary impact because of their intensity. Yes, that’s the important word: intensity. That’s what I find missing in paintings of cows and motorcycles, as much as I miss it in the kind of color field painting that [Clement] Greenberg was sponsoring.
These are just formal exercises, and it really doesn’t matter to me if these exercises are abstract or realistic—they’re simply not interesting. They don’t have the kind of personal intensity, the personal engagement, the metaphor, the feeling, and the knowledge of art that should be in them—what I see in late Guston, and also in his early abstractions of the fifties and early sixties—the same knowledge of art, of himself, and deep [social/political] engagement. An emotional feeling, a sense of order, and an incredible sense of composition and color. It’s when the subjective vision is absent, the commitment—like in the new realism and some of the color-field painting—that I lose interest. But certainly I don’t have any stylistic preferences.22
Selz’s ideas about significance in art unfold consistently, representing a carefully chosen vantage point. It is far less the particular style than the vision that he seeks and most admires when he finds it. In this he always returns to the work of his New York friend Mark Rothko. And the basis for this loyalty is that Rothko, more than any other artist, satisfies Selz’s desire to reconcile the nonobjective and the figurative poles. Selz also embraces the minimalism of John McLaughlin and Josef Albers’s Hard Edge abstractions, but that requires, given the human “presence” as the final measure, going beyond formalist criticism: “It is a sense of order. Art is broad enough that it should incorporate a person’s vision, whether an obvious sense of order or random. And it’s this [visionary] sense of order that I see in, for example, John McLaughlin—who had an extraordinary sensitivity to form. When I see that, I admire the work. Now, I admire it most when it comes together as in Mark Rothko. That I admire more than anything.”23
By the mid-1960s, even Rothko and de Kooning were being viewed in some quarters as a “dead end,” at least for younger artists and critics. So Peter Selz’s exhibition record was subject to criticism from an impatient and changing art world that wanted to move forward. His willingness to adopt a contrary position in the face of prevalent art world fashion, most memorably 1960s Pop Art, appears to have also played a role in growing pressure for him to leave MoMA. The following account may be apocryphal, but it expresses the mood of the time and the rapid changes that were under way in the art world: One day in the early 1960s, Peter was rushing to a meeting somewhere in MoMA. Passing through the galleries he encountered Frank Stella, perhaps the leading figure among the “young Turks” of contemporary American art. Peter had forgotten his watch, so he stopped, greeted Frank, and asked him for the time. Frank paused and then responded, “It’s time for you to leave.”
In New Art City, Jed Perl draws a picture of the Manhattan art world that is simultaneously positive and negative—vital, youthful, exciting, superactive, but increasingly cynical and commercialized. For nouveau riche collectors, art was an extension of personal wealth, a means to demonstrate power and social standing. Although the Museum of Modern Art still served as the institutional identity of modern and, to some extent, contemporary art,24 it was already coming to represent what a younger generation of artists was beginning to reject. There was a growing sense among them that the museum was becoming outdated, certainly in terms of their ideas, interests, and objectives. The popular Chuck Berry 1956 rock-and-roll youth-culture anthem, “Roll over Beethoven,” could just as well have been the theme song of the day in all creative fields.25 Others of Peter’s generation—including Greenberg and his favored artists, all supported by MoMA—were also subjected to the same suspicion and, finally, rejection that Selz was beginning to sense personally.
In fact, the situation at the Museum of Modern Art was deteriorating for Peter. What started out as a dream job had become less so. Interviews conducted by Sharon Zane with MoMA staff in a 1991 oral history project, along with internal museum memos, suggest several factors leading to Selz’s growing discomfort in his position at MoMA. Taken in no particular order they include curatorial infighting and rivalry (the oft-repeated but unsubstantiated rumor that Bill Seitz wanted Peter’s job); the extreme unlikelihood that Peter would ever realize his ambition of the top job as director; and possible dissatisfaction with him personally, or his performance, on the part of the administration. And one cannot discount the “Jewish issue” as an obstacle to Peter’s hopes for advancement. A fuller quote from the previously cited Art News editorial by Thomas B. Hess describes the Jewish “glass ceiling” in many museums, not excluding the supposedly progressive MoMA:
Because most museums were founded by Old Money—the town’s country club set, established bankers, merchants, landlords—their boards of trustees retain a distinctive coloration chiefly marked by a suspicion of—let’s say snobbishness to—the New Rich. Which suggests a reason for one of the more curious anomalies in the museum world: its anti-semitism—the most widely known, unspoken fact in the field. Key positions in the best art-history departments . . . are open to Jews, but when the trustees for Eastern and Midwest museums go shopping for a director, it goes without saying that no Jew need apply (unless, naturally, he has successfully changed his name and his religion).26
These difficulties, his co-workers generally agreed, combined to create a pressure to move on that Peter could not ignore.
As much as Peter admired René d’Harnoncourt, a few of the MoMA interviewees speculated that Peter was rubbing him, and possibly Alfred Barr, the wrong way. In his 1973 history of the museum, Good Old Modern, Russell Lynes writes only that “Selz stayed for seven years, and was encouraged—indeed, urged—by d’Harnoncourt to accept a job at Berkeley.”27 Peter no doubt had detractors among his colleagues, most notably Porter McCray, who resented him and wanted to minimize his influence. It is difficult to draw conclusions about the actual situation, and Peter himself continues to paint a generally positive picture of his collegial relationships. Reading his 1994 MoMA interview, one would think that even if everything was not all roses, at least the working environment was civil and generally supportive. And that may have been the case on a superficial level. With the possible exception of Bill Seitz, however, Peter admits ruefully that he had no close friends among his colleagues at MoMA. Once in a staff meeting he looked around and tried to locate a single person who had invited him to his or her house, even just for cocktails if not dinner. He came up empty, a disappointment that evidently bothers him to this day.28
Peter does bemoan the lack of real friendships at MoMA, but he tends still to think of his colleagues as “liking” him. That was presumably true in some cases, but a few colleagues, speaking for the record, were not always flattering. Collector and MoMA trustee Walter Bareiss, when asked by oral historian Sharon Zane about the departure of several key curators (among them Selz and Seitz), described a kind of administrative housecleaning:
Even though I liked him personally, Seitz was not a very efficient person. I don’t think he could really hold the job the way he should. . . . Selz was a little too abrasive [italics in transcript]. I think he left because Barr wouldn’t stand for that—Dorothy Miller wouldn’t stand for it either. He was ambitious, a person who would take over. . . . But that in itself, why not? I don’t have any objection to people who try, and then they go and make their future at some other institution. It is nothing negative for their character. But there are some institutions [presumably MoMA was one] who [sic] cannot afford to have kings and princes.29
Helen M. Franc, editorial associate and special assistant to d’Harnoncourt, who apparently got out before the situation further deteriorated, offers her own characterization of the environment during Selz’s tenure at the museum:
It was a time of considerable internecine rivalry. I guess it was aggravated by the fact that after Alfred [Barr] was shunted from his position as director, the Museum was run by committee, which never does any institution any good. . . . It was a very disruptive time. Everybody hated everybody else in the Museum and there were alignments of who was against whom. Also, when I got to work with Porter [McCray], well, with René particularly, I realized there was a rather naive view of the staff towards what the function of a director was. So they thought he wasn’t paying enough attention to their little needs. . . .30
Bill [Seitz] was more charismatic [than Selz] . . . but very self-centered. And when he was working on an exhibition he would bug out from all the responsibilities of the department and stay home, theoretically writing a catalogue. . . . Peter, who was less liked, was really a much better administrator; he carried on things. Bill was always trying to put the skids on Peter.31
Generally speaking, the MoMA interviews give the impression that virtually everyone was unhappy and that many harbored grudges, especially against those above or in direct competition with them. Of course, this condition is true of many organized working environments, and apparently MoMA was no exception. Even Peter’s assistant, associate curator Alicia Legg, for whose work he had kind and appreciative words, described her boss’s departure in less than favorable terms: “Selz was sort of dismissed . . . was essentially asked to leave. Something about vouchers for trips he’d taken.” And surprisingly, in light of what Peter remembers as a positive working relationship, when Legg was asked if there weren’t some other dissatisfaction, her answer was “Yes. He just wasn’t up to the job.”32 Elsewhere in the interview, however, in speaking of her boss she sounds almost affectionate. And another co-worker, publications manager Frances Pernas, remembers Peter as a pleasure to work with: “He was a nice man. He had a warmth about him.”33
Whatever the truth of these after-the-fact and sometimes almost hostile oral profiles, the overall picture is fairly dismal. As for Legg’s assertion that travel voucher irregularities, submitting claims for “more than he deserved,” were cause for his dismissal (as his colleagues believed he was), Peter acknowledges there was indeed a problem, documented by memos in the MoMA archives, but it was a small matter of $63.25 and occurred four years before he left the museum.34 Although it seems unlikely that this single early infraction would have been left simmering for so long, it may well have become part of a plan for later administrative action. But this was not the only, or even the most telling, aspect of a deteriorating situation that contributed to Selz’s decision to abandon New York for a fresh start both professionally and personally.
• • •
One mark of a full life is achieving some meaningful degree of balance between the professional arena and the private realm built around friends and, above all, family. These areas, though overlapping, remain separate experiential entities, and often work in competition with each other. While Peter’s successes at MoMA were compounded by the string of exhibitions for which he is still known, everything seemed to be on track. The family lived well, in a large apartment at 333 Central Park West (see Fig. 13). But something was lacking in the area of close personal relationships. Peter and Thalia socialized with couples well known in art and literary circles, among them Lionel and Diana Trilling. But whereas Thalia was willing to enjoy these friendships at face value, Peter felt a distance.
Despite their active social life—museum events, art receptions, dinners—Peter feels to this day that they had few “real” friends in New York.35 The exceptions were Bill Seitz and Dore Ashton. These two were his best friends in New York, and Ashton has remained in Peter’s close circle. As for Seitz, there is much to learn from their working relationship at MoMA and what Peter understood to be a close friendship.36 Their association began well. Much later Thalia, speaking to Peter, recalled: “You really ranked [thought highly of] them, you wanted to get a duplicate of that closeness—a substitute for family.” Peter did not disagree: “That’s right. And you felt close to them too. You remember the time we were out at Princeton and Bill was taking mescaline? That brought me closer to him.”37 The incident he refers to, a visit with Bill and Irma Seitz at their Princeton home, reveals a very sixties aspect of their social interaction. The mescaline, he explains, was an “informal experiment.” On this occasion, he and the two women observed Bill with considerable curiosity as he experienced a mescaline high. A week or two later, Peter was scheduled to conduct the same “experiment” in the same company. But the second event never took place.
It was not just his social life that failed to satisfy Selz. His domestic life had also frayed into disorder. There are ample clues as to where things went wrong between husband and wife. Sadly, Thalia’s ability to recall the past was stolen from her by Alzheimer’s disease. She lived out her last years in a Long Island care facility and died in early 2010. During that time she was visited regularly by younger daughter Gabrielle. Gaby, as friends and family call her, lives in Southampton not far from the Hampton Care Center, where her once strikingly beautiful mother, an accomplished writer of short stories who by her former husband’s admission helped him significantly with his own writing, spent her final days. Nonetheless, Thalia contributes to this biography through the gift of analog recording technology and taped conversations. Ten cassettes recorded in 1993 and 1994, provided by Gabrielle, give her a compelling presence as an intelligent and knowledgeable individual, though one held captive by anger and bitterness.
Although the Peter and Thalia story, their seventeen years together, began as an intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling relationship,38 he had one serious weakness: an inability to limit himself to one partner. This probably was the deal breaker for Thalia, who, as Peter’s Pomona faculty colleague and good friend Charles Leslie put it, was “almost insanely jealous.” In the end, Peter’s infidelity was, as later wives discovered, one of the unspoken and nonnegotiable terms of being married to him.
The taped conversations were initiated by Thalia, ostensibly to gather material for a memoir of their art world life together. Peter readily agreed to her proposal (though they had divorced almost thirty years earlier, they had stayed connected), and they met several times to do the tapes in New York and Berkeley in the early 1990s. The fundamental differences in their approaches to forming the memoir are evident from the beginning. Thalia’s interest was in their troubled personal life; focusing on their marriage and family, she sought answers. For Peter, in contrast, professional life trumped the personal. The reasons for their failure in the domestic sphere, a central concern for Thalia, were for Peter less worthy of discussion than was his career and success in the art world, specifically during his seven years at the Museum of Modern Art.
The one point on which they were in agreement was that in the early days—in Chicago, Paris, and even Pomona—they were very much in love. As a young couple building a life together, they, as Thalia puts it, “worked as a unit.” Throughout this long mutual interview, Thalia’s tone is determined and, at times, combative. She is on a mission to understand what went wrong, and to force Peter not only to recognize but to acknowledge the hard and destructive realities of their relationship, especially as it fell apart in New York. Peter, for his part, is conciliatory but apparently oblivious to the downward spiral their family life was taking. In fact, he seems genuinely mystified by Thalia’s harsh critique of their last years together and puzzled by her negative memories. He either ignores, or is unwilling to discuss, the underlying problems and their causes, despite the collateral damage to their young daughters. What on the surface might seem an admirable trait—insistence on the good parts of a shared history—here resembles more a pattern of willful denial in service to a carefully cultivated self-conception.
What happened to the love, brimming with optimism for the future, that these attractive and interesting young quasi-bohemians shared? Some answers emerge almost immediately as Thalia tries to establish the direction of the planned memoir:
I see the focus on our life together in New York. . . . I also see a very personal impact that the New York art world had on me. The immense excitement it offered and the degree to which it probably permanently warped some of my better values. I’d like to explore the depth of my hostility. . . . I remember those years as the seven lean years, when you were at the Museum of Modern Art. I don’t blame the museum for everything that happened to me, or to you. I think it was an extremely important formative period in your life and career. I do think it had a destructive impact upon me—and on our marriage, although we can’t blame our breakup on MoMA. I think it made childrearing immensely difficult, virtually impossible.
Peter’s response is surprisingly neutral, as if he were listening to someone else’s story, agreeing that these difficulties would “add a great deal of interest to the book.” Thalia perceptively observes: “I am, I think, like Peter, very concerned with history—but I’m more concerned with personal history, and he with a history both personal and public.”
Here and there, the two momentarily set aside the personal element for an interesting conversation about artists in New York, allowing a glimpse of the stimulation that the art world provided. The discussion of their friend Mark Rothko and his chapel in Houston, Texas, suggests just how much they had in common; Thalia recalls: “I saw the last great paintings of Rothko in his studio. I was sitting beside him, liked them, but didn’t have a strong feeling—until I saw a slide of the interior of the chapel last spring with the painting in situ. It hit me like a sledge hammer.”
Although Peter and Thalia had a common interest in art and literature and what appears to be a lasting admiration for each other’s creative and intellectual abilities, they differed markedly in their respective views of matrimony and the obligations of childrearing. Both agreed that they were lacking as parents, but Thalia more than Peter seemed to take the deficiency seriously. This comes into painful relief as their taped conversation proceeds, growing ever more candid. At one point, Thalia asks Peter what it was like being a husband and father during their time in New York; his answer probably reveals more than he intended: “The museum really occupied my time; it was the focus of my life. Not being home many nights during the week—I must have been writing then— and on the weekends. During the day I was in my office, running my department. That must have been very, very difficult for you. In the evening, I worked on writing. So wrapped up in my work—but that isn’t so different from all these artists we’ve been talking about. They led the same kind of lives with wives and children.”
Thalia then confronts Peter directly on his role in their failed family: “One thing occurs to me. I don’t think we had a life together, after a certain time.” Peter, seemingly shocked by the harsh judgment, murmurs, “Oh, my God.” Thalia is not in a mood to be dissuaded: “You lived there at 333 [Central Park West], we went out together in New York, went to parties. . . . There is, should be, a family bonding that creates a unit. We were a dysfunctional family. We didn’t know how to put together a working unit—except for the two of us. . . . It didn’t really work when we had kids.”
Thalia’s Greek American family may have been, to use her own term, crazy, but they managed to work together. And she wonders if maybe she did not want to replace that family unit with another, thereby almost guaranteeing failure. Peter’s sympathetic response reinforces what we already know of his Munich childhood: “That’s a great contrast to my family. . . . Hadn’t thought about it in that way, but maybe that was responsible. I really did not have a close family unit. So I did not know how to recreate a family of my own. In Munich the German youth group took center stage—our labor Zionist group getting ready to go to Palestine. That was the center of my life—certainly not home, certainly not school. Neither of them was important.”
Peter professes a considerable fondness for Thalia’s father, so it comes almost as a shock that the otherwise liberal father-in-law at first had difficulty accepting a Jew as his daughter’s husband. Thalia’s younger brother, Dion, describes the situation: “My father, Nicholas D. Cheronis, was a political radical and was in no way ever considered to be anti-Semitic. But when Thalia announced her engagement to Peter, he went into the basement (we had a study down there) and sulked for three days. Unusual behavior for him, as he was anything but silent about anything. He and Peter eventually became quite close, but I think that the original jolt that his daughter was marrying a Jew was a bit too much for him.”39
And so it went—Peter always trying to put the happiest construction, or at least the less damaging one, on indiscretions and related lapses. Peter has his own views as to what ended the marriage:
After all these years, seventeen we were together, I think in a way that the marriage had just run its course. We felt very separate from one another. And I must say, Thalia was more interested in—Gaby and Tanya can tell you—writing than her family, her children, her husband. Writing was always first in her life. And in my case I was more interested in my career. And then also I had a very heated affair with Norma [second wife-to-be]. She was married and I was married; she was married to a New York lawyer named Spiegel. . . . Norma represented a new kind of excitement. She was getting her master’s at the Institute of Fine Arts in art history. So we talked a lot. We had that in common, although she never did much with it. She was pretty and bright.40
When asked if he viewed Norma as a means to escape what was becoming a boring, even stifling marriage, he responded emphatically: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly . . . I took a big step which I regretted very much. One reason I divorced Norma [each claims to have divorced the other after two years of marriage] was that I wanted to get back with Thalia. . . . But it didn’t work. The same problems were still paramount.”41 Norma’s account has it the other way around: she left him.42
Peter is straightforward about his views regarding marriage and family responsibilities. He readily confides that “basically I’m not monogamous. Very few of us are, although we try.”43 Peter believes that the freedom and independence to pursue personal interests is a reasonable position and, if accepted by both partners, can bring about a kind of bohemian domestic utopia: “A shared life, shared interests, a shared family with your kids, these things come first. The physical—a sex partner for one night isn’t very different from a tennis game. It’s a physical experience, sometimes with no more significance than a game of tennis. And in many cases I think this is nice, and why not? I made a big distinction between loyalty and possessiveness.”44
There was, however, another complication in this ill-starred marriage, and it effectively deprives Thalia of much of the injured spouse role. In terms of adultery, within the Selz union there seems to have been plenty to go around. Thalia had her own share of lovers during the married years, beginning at least as early as Pomona.45
As for daughters Tanya and Gaby, one event very early in their lives demonstrated the degree to which Peter and Thalia were either unprepared or unwilling to be effective parents. Peter recalls the incident thus:
What happened was this. The family, including Thalia’s parents, rented a house in Northern Italy for the summer [1960]. The six of us were living in this house. And my father-in-law simply could not stand the fact that Tanya never stopped crying. You know, as a father it was bad enough, but for somebody else it was very difficult. And a neighbor said, “Why don’t you send her to a kinderheim in the Alps, where they are taken care of very nicely.” And that’s what we did. . . . I was working on the Futurist show for MoMA. We left them in Innsbruck and rented a car and went as far as Rome. Gaby thought Thalia was nearby and writing. That was only part of the time. It was more a combination of working on the exhibition and sightseeing. But she remembers it that way because Thalia frequently put her writing ahead of her children.46
Although he calls the kinderheim a “terrible mistake,” Peter’s version of the debacle reveals an unawareness of his daughters’ feelings of abandonment, which are clearly expressed in their interview accounts and in Gaby’s unpublished work of autobiographical fiction, “Rush.”47
In fairness, it can be said that each of the Selz girls has her own happy memories of their father during the difficult New York years. Tanya remembers especially that Peter escorted them to Broadway shows: “Dad loved musicals, and sometimes he would take us with him.”48 And Gabrielle recalls excursions with him to museums and galleries, a practice they continue to this day when he visits New York or she the San Francisco Bay Area.49 Gaby makes it clear that she did not think of her parents’ behavior toward her and her sister as cruel or intentionally hurtful: “People are imperfect and their love is imperfect. But I have always felt loved by both my parents.”50 That at least seems to be an improvement over Peter’s own childhood memories, and possibly Thalia’s in some respects as well.
Thalia’s fundamental affection for the girls is expressed in a newsy 1964 letter to Peter (who was in Europe primarily on museum business), part of a numbered series in which she tried to talk him out of moving the family to California: “The cards from Ravenna were lovely and they moved me, remembering. What sillies we were. How we fought! And we were so pretty. Remember how pretty we were? Our girls are pretty now. They are making you swimming pools out of old watercolors of theirs. . . . Please be amazed. They were very eager to make you a present. Their own idea.”51
Shortly after these cajoling letters were written, the Selzes seemed to be enjoying getting out and about together in New York. One example from Thalia’s journal reports an amusing incident they witnessed at an art world event:
At a party in honor of Marcel Duchamp the night of his opening at Cordier Ekstrom. We come up with Dalí and Gala. The girl behind the desk in the foyer recognizes P. and hands us our packet, containing catalogue, invitation signed by Duchamp, etc. Then she asks Dalí to identify himself.
Dalí (sputtering): “But I am Dalí!”
Girl (deadpan): “Your full name, please?”
One side of those waxed mustachios works up a good 3 inches in outrage and embarrassment, but he finally has to submit to a formal identification in order to pick up his packet.52
Now that Thalia was getting into the swing of the lively New York social scene, California had come along to threaten her. And this after a period when she felt her life was being ruined by Manhattan and even MoMA (Peter’s job).53 Her letters to Peter that summer of 1964 vacillated between petulant complaints about the inferiority of California to coquettish musings on American culture:
Don’t tell me about the one-week runs of “everything” in S.F. I saw the theatre announcements and you didn’t. Ugh! I just can’t bear the thought that I’ve just managed to get out into NY and now you want to move me 3000 miles away from it. IT’S JUST NOT FAIR!54
By the way, are there naked bosoms on the Riviera???? Bonwit’s and Bergdorf’s are both shocked and won’t carry the [Rudi Gernreich] “topless” suits. One store in town does, but where are the suits worn!!!! It’s too funny because all you have to do would be to wear the bottom of a bikini or short shorts and let it go at that. . . . Honestly, this country!55
By 1965, Peter’s domestic life was undone, and he and Thalia divorced. With her own divorce papers, Norma Spiegel provided him what he imagined to be a less encumbered situation and a fresh start: “We decided we loved each other . . . then we moved to Berkeley. And she bought a big house on Indian Rock with an acre of land.”56 Thalia said at one point in the tapes, “Peter loves change—always moving on to something else.” Although that solution did not last long, it was part of a pattern: discarding the present wife—or job—and expectantly moving on to the next thing, often (again, his own assessment) with inadequate thought for ramifications and consequences.57
Peter Selz had worn out his welcome at MoMA and in younger corners of the New York art world as well as at home. But an attractive position was waiting for him across the country—as director of the University Art Museum at Berkeley. He departed New York City with his professional life still intact and a new life ahead of him.