Selz arrived in Berkeley in 1965 as something of a star. Everyone in the art community knew that he came from the Museum of Modern Art, and with those credentials and a record of including Californians in important exhibitions such as New Images of Man, a great deal was expected of him. There is every indication that he relished both the challenge and the attention that came with the high expectations. His goal was to “bring new light to the art of the past and be on the cutting edge of the new.”1
In the early 1960s, California was barely recognized by the New York–centric art world. Nonetheless, in 1963 a New York painter, Hans Hofmann, who had been invited in 1931 to come from Germany and teach at Berkeley for a year, promised a gift of forty-five paintings and $250,000 to the University of California at Berkeley for a new museum. That promise led to the founding of the University Art Museum, and it set Peter Selz on the final journey of his immigration story:
Walter Horn [one of the founders of Berkeley’s art history department] had come to New York several times to persuade me to make the move. . . . The plans were to build a big museum, and they needed someone to run it. I would become a tenured faculty member and director of the new museum, a $5 million project. I thought about it for a year—back and forth, back and forth. It was a tempting proposition, which I then accepted. They were going to form a collection and fund it properly. And there were other very tempting things. First, there was moving from being a curator to museum director. There was the whole idea of going to California—I had enjoyed my life at Pomona very much. I liked California, and I admired the university a great deal. They said they would start out the first year with at least a million dollars for acquisitions. And the idea of getting away from involvement with only modern art to running one that covered all of Western and Oriental art—to start a museum from scratch—appealed very much.2
Peter did not, however, have to start completely “from scratch.” The university had a small collection and used as an art gallery the powerhouse designed in 1904 by architect John Galen Howard. It had been made obsolete by greater demand for power in the 1920s, but in 1934 the Romanesque building became the university’s Powerhouse Gallery. So, although the new structure for the University Art Museum was awaiting funding, its new director did have an arena for exhibitions.
Another attraction for Peter at Berkeley was the political excitement around Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, about which people in New York had heard a great deal.3 Unfortunately, that was also one of the main campus developments that interrupted the flow of funds for the museum. No sooner had Selz arrived than he was told, “Well, we may not even be able to build the museum, but now you’re a tenured professor—we’ll just have to wait for the funds.”4 Selz discovered that some of the trustees of the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA]) were concerned about perceived competition for patrons. His first task, therefore, was to solidify support, which he was able to do with the crucial help of UC president Clark Kerr. The building proceeded, with the innovative design by Mario Ciampi and associates Richard Jorasch and Ronald Wagner intact; construction began in 1967 and was completed in late 1970 (see Fig. 16).5 But the million dollars a year for acquisitions never did materialize.
Despite these disappointments and delays, or perhaps because of them, Selz was determined to maintain his contacts with New York artists. Among them was Mark Rothko, with whom Peter and his new wife, Norma (curiously renamed Nora by her husband), visited Italy in the summer of 1966 (see Fig. 17). They met up in Rome and then drove to Florence, at Rothko’s request, to see again the transcendent Fra Angelico frescoes. As Peter recalled,
Driving north in my little Fiat, we stopped in Arezzo, as I wanted him to see the Piero della Francesco murals in the church of San Francesco. He did not respond to the Renaissance painter’s early mastery of aerial and linear perspective or the modeling of his figures. He found [Fra Angelico’s] Legend of the True Cross too narrative. At the monastery of San Marco in Florence, however, he admired the small frescoes in the monks’ cells, especially for the intimacy of the setting in each cell where the monks would be confronted by the painted images at all times.6
Norma remembered the trip differently.7 For example, she insisted that Rothko did not particularly like Peter, and that indeed it was she who was his friend—though she didn’t explain exactly what she meant by that. But her description of her ongoing relationship with Rothko, after leaving Peter and returning to New York, is enlightening in several respects.
We went to Italy in the summer of 1965, I think [in fact it was 1966], and joined up with Mark, Mell, and Kate [the Rothkos’ daughter]—can’t remember if Christopher [Rothko] was there. The Rothkos stayed with [art dealer] Carla Panicali; we stayed in a hotel, but we spent a lot of time with them. After I came back to New York after I divorced [Norma’s emphasis] Peter, I was extremely close to Mark. No, I was not his lover. But we loved each other, and I wrote a whole story about it. . . . I knew that Mark was not fond of Peter on a personal level. In addition to which Mark had a distrust of museum curators in general, which was not unusual among the New York school of painters at that time. We took the red painting [given to them both by Rothko] with us to Berkeley and hung it [in the] living room of our home in the Berkeley hills. After two and a half years I left the painting with Peter, divorced him, and moved back to New York in 1967.8
Rothko’s alleged low opinion of Peter notwithstanding, he showed up in California the following year through Selz’s arrangement. Peter recounts: “A year later I was able to persuade Mark to accept a Regent’s Professorship for the summer at Berkeley, which required no teaching and provided free time for painting in the Bay Area—where almost twenty years earlier he had begun the paintings which we now call his classic style. We spent a good deal of time together that summer. Critic Brian O’Doherty and art historian Barbara Novak were also at Berkeley at that time, and the discussions between the artist, art historians, and critic were lively and provocative. I wish we had recorded them.”9
Alongside these pleasant social breaks, however, were the ongoing funding difficulties. According to Selz, Clark Kerr never did get along with the legislature, so Kerr had to come up with another idea and said: “Let’s do this museum with no connection to state funds. It [will be] funded out of student fees, and the students are going to love this.”10
One innovation that Peter arrived at to bolster student involvement was the Pacific Film Archive. In 1966 a young film scholar from New York, Sheldon Renan, arrived in Berkeley with the idea of creating a film archive in a museum in the area. Although interest in avantgarde and independent film was evident throughout the Bay Area, Renan met resistance at both the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum. Peter Selz, in contrast, was interested. Selz says he believed that film was probably the most important art expression of the time, and, taking his cue from the program at MoMA (a Barr innovation implemented by British film critic Iris Barry) and Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, he established film as a separate department of the Berkeley museum.11
In many respects now acknowledged as the central jewel in the Berkeley museum crown and recognized worldwide for its active collecting and preservation program, PFA initially had a difficult time establishing itself and securing even minimal support for its innovative programs. In fact, according to Renan and Tom Luddy, a student who worked on the early film programs, despite Selz’s support and ambition to establish a film program to rival MoMA’s, the UC administration was fundamentally hostile to the idea of film as a legitimate component of an art museum. Peter had great enthusiasm for the idea, and “the late 1960s was certainly the time for an individual with a passion to act first—just do it—and think about the details (and the funding) later. This is exactly how the Pacific Film Archive came into being.” But he had neglected to follow procedure. The administration’s response was something of a rebuke: “As the Archive’s existence was quite unofficial as far as the university was concerned, the year’s budget, $800, was appropriated from the art museum’s publication allocation.” Founder Renan, who was made director of the PFA in 1967, described the situation in a 1971 interview: “This whole thing is put together with spit, chewing gum, good intentions, cooperation from the film community, and overhead paid by the Museum. I’m not over-budget or under-budget because I haven’t got a budget.”12 In a 2010 e-mail, Renan had more to say about the struggle to realize his personal dream of a true film archive. He begins by acknowledging the supportive role of Peter Selz: “History seems to be treating Peter too harshly. Accomplishing great things done is rarely achieved by perfect people and philosopher kings. Juicy excess and painful hubris are usually required. Neither the Berkeley Museum nor the Pacific Film Archive could have been as successful as they became without the counter-intuitive virtues resulting from the out-of-balance and slightly dysfunctional teams that started both. They were essentially separate endeavors, but each nevertheless relied on the other.”13
Tom Luddy, who in 1972 returned from working in New York to succeed Renan as director, was more forceful in his denunciation of the treatment PFA and Peter Selz received from the administration: “We were recognized around the world, except [by the administration] in Sproul Hall. The university savagely opposed the film program and punished Selz for setting it up without authorization.”14 Luddy and Renan both moved on to successful careers as consultants, and Luddy became co-founder and is the current director of the Telluride Film Festival (2011 having been its 38th season). Neither of these men, important contributors to creating and developing a world-class film program at Berkeley, has anything positive to say about the university’s treatment of PFA and UAM. But Renan gives Peter high points as a “great talent scout.” Selz describes the PFA as one of his most important accomplishments—second only to building the collection—as director of the museum. And it proved to have the student appeal that he had hoped for. In the beginning, at least, Kerr’s student funding strategy was a success.
When he arrived in California, Selz recognized immediately that art trends were quite different from those in New York. Indeed, he was one of the first East Coast observers of contemporary art to recognize this difference, a difference that is now an accepted fact of American cultural history.15 His opening show at the Powerhouse Gallery at Berkeley was Directions in Kinetic Sculpture (1966). It had been planned for MoMA, “so I had all my research done when I came out here and simply transferred it from the Museum of Modern Art to the Berkeley museum, and that really started the thing, literally, with a loud bang.”16 The exhibition was a great success, with attendance in the first month alone numbering sixty thousand. That pleased the university’s public relations department, which had been reeling from the bad press generated by the Free Speech Movement.
Impressive shows followed, one after another, establishing a distinctive identity for the museum even before the new building was dedicated. Kinetic Sculpture was followed by an exhibition of the Surrealist work of René Magritte and the first American show of Jules Pascin’s work, both of which Selz brought with him from New York. Selz’s assistant, Tom Freudenheim, curated the Pascin show, which went directly on national tour. But the most memorable exhibition, especially in terms of California art history, was Funk. As Peter recalled, “In 1967 we followed the great success of the kinetic art show with another popular one, Funk art, which was very local . . . growing out of two artists whom I found of particular interest: Peter Voulkos on the one extreme and Bruce Conner on the other. These artists all were doing art of a certain kind which was very different from what was going on anywhere else in the country.”17
In fact, the course Selz was charting at Berkeley, reflecting his quick study and adoption of a specifically Californian social and cultural situation, was innovative, even subversive—far more so than the University Art Museum itself, which had a reputation as being “elitist.” The new director described Funk, as it was presented at the Powerhouse, as a “hot, involved, biological, sensual, sexual, erotic kind of art.”18 Taking his adjectives to heart, Selz soon was seen largely in the company of artists, learning to live the California art life (see Fig. 18).
• • •
Five years after Selz’s arrival in Berkeley, in November 1970, the new University Art Museum at last opened, with considerable fanfare and an exhibition, Excellence: Art from the University Community, that consisted of six hundred works of art from antiquity to the present. Drawn from the collections of regents, alumni, and others connected to the university— including two of California’s preeminent collectors, Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty—the exhibition did double duty as a wish list for future gifts. This “elitist institution’s” new home, with its show of artworks representing the wealth and power of California, opened at the height of the student antiwar movement. But the students were able to separate art from the university administration they were battling; they “came in flocks and loved it.” The new museum on the Berkeley campus, funded by student fees, had “total support.”19
The opening exhibition at the new museum represented the high-end collecting establishment, hardly the avantgarde to which Selz was by this time personally attracted. However, a proposal from avantgarde dancer Anna Halprin established, albeit inadvertently, a point of view and direction that pushed the museum right into the Bay Area counterculture (see Fig. 19).
Prior to the three-day grand opening celebration, Halprin offered to have her dancers “wash” and “soften” the concrete ramps, overlooks, and galleries with body movement. Selz readily agreed, but without ever having seen Halprin’s work. According to Selz, curator Brenda Richardson cautioned that this could create some problems with the administration:
“‘Do you know,’ she asked, ‘that Anna’s dancers are generally nude?’”
“‘No, I didn’t,’ I responded. ‘But what can I do? I can’t withdraw my acceptance of her offer at this point. And I don’t want to censor her art.’”
So the evening went forward, with a limited group of people there by selective invitation. By all accounts, they loved this demonstration of the new museum’s “spirit.” “The performance was a feast for the eye,” Selz recalls, with “beautiful naked young men and women flowing throughout the museum. Soft flesh against hard gray concrete.”20
The museum could not have received a more appropriate California-style launching. The Halprin event was actually one of several launching the grand opening. At one, minimalist composer Steve Reich performed late into the night. Selz had met Reich, at that time not well known, in New York and invited him. The program also had happenings created by Robert Hudson and William Wiley, who found in it a role for the museum’s new director. Wiley recently described the event in colorful detail in an idiosyncratic handwritten account:
At the opening of the Berkeley Museum when I and Robert Hudson and Jim Melchert, Pete Volkus, Richard Shaw, Brenda Richardson, Bonnie Sherk, Steve Reich, and Carl Dern and Peter Selz—along with many others presented our event the “Impossible Dream” and just before the finale—Peter standing at the swinging doors—me handing him a black cowboy hat with white trim—and strapping on a couple of guns and holsters and telling him to walk to the bar draw his guns and tell the bartender—give me some art!!
Just before Peter pushes through them swingin doors the other afore named involved made a path—from louvered doors to bar—saying— Peter’s coming! Peter’s coming!! Peter strode forward hat cocked low right up to the bar where Carl Dern waited quivering in fear. Drawing his gun on reaching the bar—Peter said give me some art!! Carl from below the bar brought up an enormous flat—shot glass—with a decaled shop through it—it was wide and an inch or so thick. He proceeded to empty a fifth of 90% proof A.M.S. corn whiskey into the large flat plastic shop glass—Peter holstered his guns and raised the whiskey to his lips—
At that point with Melchert at the piano—all the dance hall girls wear up on the card tables—with song cards and the players and the audience sang—The Impossible Dream.21
In addition, there were poetry readings by Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Richard Brautigan. It was, according to curator Lucinda Barnes, a “multidisciplinary contemporary art extravaganza heralding a radical new building and an ambitious cultural enterprise, which within a matter of months would also include the Pacific Film Archive.”22
Over the course of the three days, Steve Reich did several impromptu pieces; artist Norton Wisdom recalls one vividly. In his recollection, he was one of a dozen students seated on the concrete floor of the main gallery. There was no announcement of the event; somehow the word spread and a few curious individuals showed up to see what was going on. Reich incorporated them into the performance, clustering them together with half a dozen reel-to-reel tape decks placed around them. One long tape snaked through the Sony decks, producing competing but related musical passages. Wisdom remembers that it was beautiful, and it stirred his newfound interest in performance art and music, which became, years later, central elements in his mature art.23
The move from New York to “laid-back” California put Peter in touch with a counterculture that seemed organic and natural to the place rather than invented or imposed. It provided the context for him to realize the full liberation he had sought earlier and that in a fundamental way represented his authentic personal identity. Aligning himself with artists and their natural readiness to step outside the rules of art and society, Selz still likes to think of himself as a sympathetic mediator between artists and the essential institutions—museums, universities—that serve them, or should do so. Each of his books and exhibitions was based on the idea that the creative individual, the artist, was at the center of the whole cultural enterprise, not the scholar or the curator. Peter places himself in the artists’ camp.
• • •
Selz’s exhibition record at Berkeley, whether at the old Powerhouse or in the new Ciampi building, is an impressive one. The kinetic art show, the first with Selz as director, remains the one he generally points to as his most historically significant. Directions in Kinetic Sculpture grew out of Selz’s encounter with the work of Jean Tinguely and most immediately the 1960 installation at MoMA. Selz was fascinated by the introduction of motion and change into art making, with the subject of the sculpture becoming movement itself. And he saw the issues and ideas involved, especially time and change, as fundamental to modernist thinking. In his brief but carefully considered catalogue preface, Selz in effect introduced a new subject and did so by suggesting connections to other manifestations of modernism:
The Constructivists’ point of view was propagated by László Moholy-Nagy who . . . clearly saw into the future and formulated a theory of kinetic art which would not materialize for more than a generation. He advocated the activation of space by means of a dynamic-constructive system of forces and hoped to substitute relationships of energies for the old relationships of form in art. . . . Kinetic sculpture was widely discussed at the Bauhaus and at its offshoot, the Institute of Design in Chicago. There Moholy-Nagy published his influential book, Vision in Motion, in which he postulates that kinetic sculpture is the fifth and last of the successive stages in the development of plastic form.24
Selz also knew Buckminster Fuller from the Chicago years, and he quotes him to establish the scientific relevance of kineticism in art, invoking the triumphant image of Einstein “shattering” the Newtonian cosmos: “Einstein realized that all bodies were constantly being affected by other bodies, and this meant their normal condition was not inertia but continuous motion and continuous change. The replacement of the Newtonian static norm . . . really opened the way to modern science and technology, and it’s still the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history.”25 One of Selz’s gifts is his ability to syncretize his subjects, whether artists or movements, within a historical context that does not obviate their creative identity outside of that history.
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture featured the work of fourteen sculptors, only four of whom were American, and boasted several “firsts”: it was not only Peter’s first show at Berkeley but also the first show in kinetic sculpture in the United States; it featured the first catalogue essay by kinetic sculptor George Rickey; and it introduced a struggling young San Francisco sculptor, Fletcher Benton, whose career took off thanks to his inclusion in the exhibition. Benton was eager to go on record recalling his fortuitous “discovery” by Selz, at the same time expressing admiration for what Peter contributed in a broader sense to Bay Area art and cultural life:
The word got out that this Museum of Modern Art curator had taken a professorship at Berkeley. And he totally changed, from my point of view, the local atmosphere and the hopes of the artists. . . . So we all felt that this man was a god—that he was going to do great things for the Bay Area. . . . One day I got a phone call: “This is Peter Selz.” And anybody who’s talked to Peter knows he has this deep, impressive baritone voice. He had heard that I was making some moving things, wall pieces. And he asked if he could come by to see them. My first thought was, my god, here’s this incredible museum man coming to my basement studio.
Well, in a few days he showed up, and he was so friendly. . . . He looked at what I had and asked me if I would be interested in being in the show. I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t even know there was a [kinetic art] movement. . . . And then . . . Time magazine did an article [on the show] . . . and my phone started ringing off the hook. I was in many other kinetic shows, but never such a pioneering group as the one Peter brought here.26
In a similar way, the Funk show helped define Selz’s career at UAM, and was certainly at least as important for the local scene. But exactly what was Funk? How was it identified as a distinct phenomenon, and how were the artists selected? Selz found this important question difficult to answer.
Well, I don’t know. In the catalogue to the show I wrote that Funk can’t really be defined. When you see it, you know it. But it was a kind of art which was totally irreverent, an art that was loud—I said “unashamed”—in a way that relates to Dada and was very different from the Pop Art. It also came out of the Slant Step show that Bill Wiley and Bruce Nauman had been involved with slightly earlier [1966]. . . . I knew Harold [Paris], I knew Bruce [Conner], I knew Pete [Voulkos]— and I met Wiley, Bob Hudson, and Arlo Acton. And then the ceramic people like [Robert] Arneson and [David] Gilhooly. All of a sudden it seemed to me there was a close relationship [among them] in this kind of art. A casual, irreverent . . . art, art which dealt with bodily functions . . . biomorphic art which was sloppy rather than formal.27
Selz thinks of Jeremy Anderson as “sort of the daddy” of Funk, but looking back, he singled out Wiley and Arneson as the leading exponents. He goes on to say, “There were dozens of people in Berkeley, Davis, San Francisco, and up in Marin County who were doing this kind of work.” Along with his staff—assistant director Tom Freudenheim and curators Brenda Richardson and Susan Rannells—Selz went to “a great many studios,” and together they picked twenty-seven artists who they felt represented the “movement.” Selz would not use the term movement today for funk, even though his exhibition implied some cohesiveness. The artists surely did not feel they were part of a movement; in fact, they resisted the idea. Selz now, if not then, is very much aware of the limitations of the term in regard to individual artists and works.
“With all its color and . . . irreverence,” Selz recalled, “it seemed like a marvelous show, [which] put its finger on a certain pulse of this land of funk . . . this bohemian kind of art.”28 It had a somewhat mixed response, however. The public “loved it, almost as much as they loved the kinetic show. They thought it was a delight. . . . That was a popular response. The art critical response was slightly different: Artforum tore it to pieces. Artforum [founded in San Francisco, then moved to Los Angeles] had moved from California to New York and was taken over by the Greenberg contingent, so they hated it. But in general the response was very, very positive.”29
From the moment of his arrival in Berkeley, Selz had been interested in the “totally different . . . local kind of thing” he observed in the art being made in Northern California. He and his museum colleagues, as well as some of the artists themselves, soon began talking about the idea that became the Funk show. And Peter says it was at his suggestion that his best artist friend and UC Berkeley colleague, Harold Paris, had published an essay on the subject in Art in America a month before the show opened.30 Selz was attuned to what was original in reflecting a peculiarly Californian sensibility, and the selection of artists presents a similar attitude and aesthetic: much of the work looks the same. Among the artists, Selz particularly admired one: Bruce Conner. In his opinion, in fact, Conner was possibly the most important artist working in California, from the standpoint of pure creative originality and power of statement. And there was an even more fundamental quality that Selz believed Conner shared with another of his favorites, despite the great differences in their work:
The reason I think Mark Rothko is such a great painter is because of the internal look—his are all emotional paintings. They are paintings of the soul. I think there is a tremendous distinction between this kind of internalized abstraction and what Greenberg called color field painting, which is nothing but color design on a flat plane. It has nothing to do with the human soul. . . . Well, form and style don’t matter when I see quality that I respond to. In 1960 I saw this child in a black box by Bruce [Conner]. And I had never seen anything like it. It was true that Rauschenberg was doing assemblages in New York. But, wonderful as they were, they didn’t have quite the power of Bruce’s work.31
On other occasions Peter has invoked these two names together as representing what he looks for when thinking of greatness. Although he may not put it as directly in connection with Conner, there is no question that the shared quality is a spiritual search for the soul through art. This is the quality that Selz has consistently sought, beginning with his study of German Expressionism, throughout his long career. And when he encounters the work that exhibits these expressionist qualities, he does his best to encourage the artist and promote his or her work.
Several of the artists in the Funk show received this preferential attention, but none more than Bruce Conner (see Fig. 23). Even Harold Paris and Pete Voulkos did not seem to ignite Selz’s passion to the same degree.32 But in a phone conversation a year before he died in July 2008, Conner was unexpectedly withholding—one might even say ungrateful—in his comments.33 Then again, he was notoriously difficult to work with, especially in the later years, marked as they were by a long illness that limited his activity, and he seemed to blame almost every part of the art world—and virtually every individual—for his perceived lack of success. This despite the critical acclaim he received almost from the beginning of his career and to which Peter contributed. Selz would certainly agree with the judgment of curator Peter Boswell, who, comparing Conner favorably to Rauschenberg and Warhol, suggested that the San Franciscan “will eventually be recognized as one of—perhaps the—most important West Coast artist of his time.”34
Conner did reluctantly allow that Selz was “a great supporter. But I’d rather not say more.”35 His main complaint, in general but in this case clearly directed at Peter, was that the support he’d received had little influence on sales. He further claimed that he’d had no income for the past five years. Peter was understandably disappointed by this criticism, but he also understood that Bruce was in a sense a perpetual outsider, challenging the art establishment and especially the market, despite his being represented by devoted dealers such as San Francisco’s Paule Anglim. In particular, Paula Kirkeby remembers Bruce as a unique artistic force. She thinks of him not only as the artist she represented but as her mentor. “It was, above all, Bruce’s spirituality and the Jewish mystical Kabbalah”—they were for her the “key” to Bruce. Paula admired that Bruce’s interests were based, but not slavishly dependent, on Eastern philosophy. Among art professionals in the Bay Area who understood Bruce in this respect were Peter Selz and de Young Museum curator Tom Garver. Peter especially “got it,” and Bruce recognized and appreciated that fact. Kirkeby thinks of Bruce and Selz, and Garver, as connected by mutual understanding.36 Selz’s opinion of Conner’s importance remains unchanged. Furthermore, his presence in the Funk show was essential: “More than the other artists, many of whose work did not go much deeper than a blasé surface irreverence, Conner was profoundly engaging the major issues of the human condition.”37
The debate about the term Funk, its specific meaning and relationship to a regional art, continues. Harold Paris claimed the honor of naming Funk. Artist Sonia Rapoport reports that Harold, seeking her help, called her when he was writing an article on the subject for Art in America and admitted that he needed a name for the new movement. She went to her dictionary and somehow arrived at the word funk; when she read him the jazz-related definition, Harold said, “That’s it!”38 One of the artists in the show, and another who should have been, also speak to the term and in doing so provide some insight into what Selz and his colleagues were thinking as they prepared this spectacularly nonmainstream effort. William T. Wiley and Wally Hedrick (whose absence from the exhibition was a noteworthy oversight), in comments separated by thirty years, provided the same definition of Funk. In a 1974 interview, Hedrick answered the big question with a specific example. According to him, Funk would describe the peculiar practice of his eccentric former wife, artist Jay DeFeo, of storing her dirty underwear in the refrigerator:
When I first got to know Jay DeFeo, I’d go over to her house and talk. One day when she’d gone to the john or someplace, I began looking for something to eat. I went to the refrigerator and opened it up—and all of her old underwear was in it. It was a couple years’ supply. The refrigerator was off, probably hadn’t run in ten years, and she never washed her clothes. And so—instead of putting it somewhere else or throwing it away when she finally took off her underwear—she’d just stick it in the refrigerator. . . . Funky, but I also think she’s obsessed with being that way.39
At a dinner at the Selz residence early in 2009, Bill Wiley cited exactly the same example.40
Wally Hedrick also provides insight into one of the controversial aspects of the Funk art exhibition. Many of the artists, despite the recognition that the invented catch-all term conferred, objected to it, Hedrick chief among them:
Yeah, I think Selz was just trying to give us a working term. . . . And he has given the artists a style. [But] the artist’s job is to do the work. The museum person should be accurate and check his facts, try to get them straight. So, the artist sits around and says, “That guy isn’t doing his job—right?—as well as he could.” And this is what I guess maddened the people I talked to, it [the show and term] gets international recognition, and it’s all based on an inaccuracy. Here’s a reputable guy who is now known internationally for something that’s a fraud. I personally don’t care, but a lot of people are upset about it.41
Harold Paris provided a much less angry response and a more evocatively descriptive view of the phenomenon in his “Sweet Land of Funk” article for Art in America:
The artist here [San Francisco Bay Area] is aware that no one really sees his work, and no one really supports his work. So, in effect, he says “Funk.” But also he is free. There is less pressure to “make it.” The casual, irreverent, insincere California atmosphere, with its absurd elements— weather, clothes, “skinny-dipping,” hobby craft, sun-drenched mentality, Doggie Diner, perfumed toilet tissue, do-it-yourself—all this drives the artist’s vision inward. This is the Land of Funk. . . . Idiosyncratic, eccentric, its doctrine amoral. . . . In essence “a groove to stick your finger down your throat and see what comes up.” This is funk.42
In its rhythmical cadence and random listing of arbitrary characteristics, this description reads very much like a Beat-era poem. Indeed, the attitudinal connections between these artists and poets and jazz musicians characterized the creative community of the Bay Area, where there was, above all, the intersection of art and politics. This is what Peter was looking for and found in California.
Curator Connie Lewallen, describing the unusual situation at Berkeley in the 1960s, outlines the cultural framework that not only distinguished Selz’s new environment but also pointed in the direction the new museum was to take.43 Berkeley, more than any other location, brought the antiestablishment forces at work in America together in a university-based protest counterculture that is generally regarded as without precedent in this country. The major social and political issues of the day took hold in and around the Berkeley campus, providing a focal point for debate and action, a kind of mirror to contemporary American social change. The broader context, Lewallen points out, was the Vietnam War, which “defined the consciousness of the late 1960s and 1970s. . . . The fulcrum of protest against inequality at home and the war abroad was the University of California, the scene not only of countless antiwar demonstrations but also of the Free Speech Movement, the 1969 third-world student organization strike, which met with violent police action, and conflicts over People’s Park.”44
Within this volatile atmosphere, the University Art Museum demonstrated, from its earliest years, a commitment to radical, politically engaged new art. It was in Peter Selz’s nature to pick up the activist cause immediately upon arrival (in fact, he claims that confrontational politics were part of his attraction to the Berkeley job), and he did so looking to the Bay Area assemblage movement on which the Funk show was based. Lewallen called it Selz’s “eponymous 1967 exhibition,” pointing to the characteristic use of found objects and urban debris that was suggestive of decay. Sexual and political overtones characterized the work of the Beat-era literary and art underground, which provided the foundation for the decade’s cultural “upheavals” and the emergence of a new avantgarde. Lewallen’s claim that the art museum was one of the major sites to recognize and bring to public view radical changes in the visual arts does not seem overstated.45
In a surprising contradiction, however, Selz says that making such sweeping claims for Funk as a series of illustrations of the times is over-reaching, that assigning such historical importance to cultural events puts at risk full appreciation of other aspects of the moment. In the case of the Funk show and the admittedly varied works on display, he insists that he and his colleagues—Freudenheim, Richardson, and Rannells— had no large goals in mind. They were interested simply in recognizing what they saw as a regional manifestation of the larger assemblage movement. And beyond the often-present politics and social commentary, Selz wanted to acknowledge the humor and appreciation of the absurd that the art he called Funk owed to Dada. “We did not think this was an Important Art Movement, but we saw it largely as a fun thing to do in keeping with the work itself. I had a great deal of fun organizing the show, installing it in the old Powerhouse, and writing about it to conclude with a quote from King Ubu.”46 Despite this disclaimer regarding art-historical intentions, Selz now describes Bay Area Funk as the last significant regional movement in America.47
The appropriateness of the term in the visual arts context is neatly presented by cultural historian Richard Cándida Smith: “[The term] funk suggested the use of rough and dirty materials, along with a lack of concern for a fine surface. As in jazz, the term primarily indicated a mental framework in which immediate response to the performative possibilities of materials took precedence over theory . . . funk became closely associated with the use of found objects and the assemblage tradition.”48
Art historian Sophie Dannenmüller takes a slightly different point of view in terms of Funk as an art phenomenon with a particular relationship to assemblage. She sees Funk art and California assemblage as two distinct movements, converging in the work of certain artists at specific times. For her, Funk is above all a uniquely Bay Area expression of an aesthetic attitude, one that encompasses assemblage but is not restricted to a single medium (as was assemblage). Politics may be present, but it remains peripheral to the “movement’s” core identity, which is a “countercultural and anticonformist [not just nonconformist] aesthetic attitude.”49 The importance of Selz’s Funk exhibition, according to Dannenmüller, was that it introduced the art world to that specifically Northern Californian aesthetic. (Even France learned of it, through a 1970 article in the magazine L’Œil by art critic José Pierre.)
It may be that the Funk show, with its sly irreverence, playful humor, and sociopolitical commentary, was closest to Peter’s own sensibilities, even though the preceding kinetic exhibition was internationally more significant. Funk represented the bohemian ideal of unfettered creative freedom. In its sexual forms and imagery, it reflected aspects of the libertine lifestyle that so attracted Peter and in which, through his friendship with artists, notably Harold Paris, he became an enthusiastic participant. In California Peter learned that one could do more than just make a living in art; one could actually live art.
In many respects Peter and Harold—along with Pete Voulkos—were regarded as the bohemian triumvirate of the UC Berkeley art faculty. Many of their colleagues and students saw them as exemplars of the fully liberated California lifestyle, which included sexual freedom. Peter sees those years as a period of “amorous relationships,” usually sequential and occasionally leading to short-lived matrimony. Yet there was another side to that social culture, produced and driven by a bohemian/ hippie ideal focused on sexual adventurism and homegrown orgies.
Harold Paris’s widow, Deborah (Debby), was both a witness to and a participant in the life and times. She remembers the erotic life that her former husband and Peter pursued as being a keystone of their close friendship. On select nights in 1972, Harold’s vast studio on Oakland’s Market Street attracted both artists (including UC faculty) and (mostly graduate) students. She characterized the behavior of the group in which they moved as awash in a kind of ingenuous sexual opportunism. “The Free Love Movement wasn’t started by Harold and Peter,” she observed; her impression, rather, was that a much younger group took the lead and Peter and Harold simply “took advantage” and followed.50
When Debby met Harold, she was an art student, with a job binding slides for the art history department in the work/study program. They married in March 1972, but, she said, it “wasn’t much fun living with someone who was out screwing that often, reveling in it.” However, she understood that it was part of the times, and certainly the place, for many counterculture artists. And she admits that she was drawn into it herself: “Peter and Harold led; I reluctantly followed.”51 Looking back, she describes these activities as sources for her husband’s sexual imagery; and she is “glad that I didn’t miss these parties and the other strange events that Harold put on (and my part in it all).” Her account is only one voice, but it does suggest that the social freedoms of the day created a world that was exciting, colorful, and, for some, troubling.
In the wake of the Free Speech and Free Love movements, the atmosphere at Berkeley was charged with an inebriating sense of change and opportunity. One art history undergraduate, Terri Cohn, recalls the laissez-faire campus ambience of the early 1970s as being in stark contrast to the present: “Smoking in lecture halls, people going barefoot everywhere, dogs in the classroom.”52 Terri studied with Herschel Chipp, whom she describes as “an inspiring and very supportive professor”—whereas Selz (who was then on sabbatical) had a “complicated reputation,” as a consequence of which she was “a bit afraid of taking a class from him.” She recalls rumors about the parties and wild behavior, but she also describes Berkeley as liberated and experimental in many areas, sexual self-discovery being a primary one. “The sexuality of the time was pervasive, yet from my position now in the twenty-first century, and as a curator and art school professor, it seems like it was somehow a more innocent zeitgeist.” In those days, as she points out, many students had their “going-naked period.”53 For many, sensuality and (heightened) authentic sensation were part of the overriding spirit of the times, as it had been for Selz’s Die Brücke painters cavorting nude in the German forests and on lakeside beaches with models and mistresses, as well as wives and assorted children, in tow. A Utopian modernist/primitivist fantasy was being imitated, however incompletely, in the hippie redoubt of California.
• • •
At Berkeley, a major part of the director’s responsibility was building the collection. This was new for Peter, who had been responsible only for exhibitions of modern painting and sculpture at MoMA. Part of what attracted him to Berkeley was the opportunity to become more involved with collecting, and although the incentive million-dollar annual acquisition budget never materialized, he was determined to make the new museum among the best of any college or university campus. Selz describes the University Art Museum’s permanent collection when he arrived as having “very, very little to start with . . . a large collection of stuff which the university had accepted over the years. Much of it totally uninteresting.” He described this disappointing accumulation of objects not even with faint praise: “There was everything from a Rembrandt to a Cimabue in the basement, and the Cimabue was some kind of nineteenth-century worm-eaten copy . . . made in Florence. So we had to sift through . . . and we did find a number of nice things like the Bierstadt and the big Leutze. But most of the stuff was really not acceptable, and some . . . is still in the basement, rotting away.”54
In this negative judgment, however, Selz was too harsh. The museum’s existing collection included worthy examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Boy in Green (ca. 1795–1805), by early American itinerant painter John Brewster Jr., and Théodore Rousseau’s Forest of Fontainebleau (1855–56), from the 1920 bequest of Phoebe Hearst. Lucinda Barnes characterized the collection that greeted Selz upon his arrival as constituting the “cornerstones” of the museum’s current collections—historical Asian paintings and works on paper; European old masters and nineteenth-century paintings and prints; nineteenth-century American art, including the grand Albert Bierstadt and Emanuel Leutze paintings, works of considerable historical significance; and finally, a strong representation of Abstract Expressionism and other twentieth-century works, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite his disparagement of the collection, Peter put it into a broader community perspective when he wrote, “The contemplation of works of art from all periods of history, from all cultures of mankind, can lead to a greater understanding of our own problems and place them in a universal context.”55 Although the Berkeley collection was and is not comprehensive, the basic idea of public benefit deriving from exposure to diversity in art—in styles, subjects, periods, and origins—can be served by what the museum has assembled. Still, Peter takes pride in the burst of collecting that he initiated (between 1965 and 1970, thirteen hundred works of art were added) and the quality of the art acquired.
The great Hans Hofmann collection, which Peter refers to proudly and perhaps too proprietarily, had its own Hofmann Wing in the new building, a fitting recognition of its status as founding gift. The gift had been negotiated at the suggestion of Clark Kerr by faculty painters Erle Loran and Glenn Wessels. It also did not hurt that the art department faculty was made up largely of former students of Hofmann’s from his two teaching stints at Berkeley. In addition to Loran and Wessels, the list included Karl Kasten, Jim McCray, and John Haley. So, for Hofmann, Berkeley was a logical place for his work to reside and be permanently on view. Selz says he was involved in the acquisition in two ways: in New York, he “knew Hans very well” and supported his work; and the final selection of paintings was made by Peter with Loran, their decisions subject to the approval of New York gallery owner Sam Kootz.56
The Hofmann gift and several of the Powerhouse shows put Berkeley on the art museum map, and in the beginning Peter had every reason to applaud himself and his decision to leave New York and MoMA. His relationship with Clark Kerr was not just good but enviable. Berkeley chancellor Roger W. Heyns came at the same time as Peter, and they became friends and eventually worked together “beautifully.” An anecdote about one early acquisition makes the point; according to Selz, it was but one of many such purchases made possible by support from the university administration, in this case expedited directly by Kerr:
Things were going beautifully at the start. . . . I’m in New York and I see this oil sketch, a superb small Rubens. And it was very cheap, $95,000— and that was about 1967. So I said, “We must get this picture authenticated by tomorrow.” I had one week to buy it, because the dealer had only two weeks before sending it back to England. I called Clark Kerr and told him I wanted to buy this Rubens. So he asked me questions about the quality and the authenticity. Then he said, “I’ll take your word for it, and I’ll allocate half the price from university-wide funds, if you can get the other half from Berkeley.” I said, “I’m here in New York, how am I going to get the other half within five days?” . . . Kerr said, “I’ll get it for you.”57
The Road to Calvary (ca. 1632) was a source of great delight for Peter and is counted among the most important acquisitions of the time. Peter’s enthusiasm seemed to be justified by the expert opinion of his discerning colleague, seventeenth-century Dutch painting specialist Svetlana Alpers, who called it among the “most beautiful as well as one of the most technically interesting of Rubens’s late oil sketches.”58
Imagine Peter’s delight, after his tenure at MoMA dealing exclusively with modern art, to be able to purchase works such as the Rubens and, his first acquisition, a sixteenth-century Pietà by Giovanni Savoldo. The latter has attached to it a humorous story that Selz is fond of telling to illustrate the workings of UC Berkeley bureaucracy: “The first painting—and a great purchase it was—was Savoldo’s Pietà with Three Saints. It was sent here, along with the invoice which I forwarded to Financial Services. The money was in the budget. Well, after a while the dealer calls, wondering about payment. When I called the Financial Office they said, ‘Professor Selz, you are new here and didn’t know that for purchases over $1,000 we need competitive bids!!’”59
The experiences Selz had enjoyed with his grandfather, visiting the museums of Munich, had finally become pertinent to his job, and he went on to collect vigorously. The current museum director, Lawrence Rinder, speaks to the contributions that resulted: “Indeed, his legacy is truly remarkable, for the works he was able to purchase as well as acquire by gift. Not surprisingly, Selz focused much attention on building strong holdings in post–War abstraction to complement the extraordinary gift of paintings from Hans Hofmann. . . . Because of [this] and because of its adventurous contemporary exhibition program, it developed a reputation as a contemporary art museum [with a] foothold in several important areas of art history including Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop Art, and Photorealism.”60
Many other knowledgeable observers agree with Rinder that the variety and, in many cases, the quality of works acquired during the Selz years provide a provocative overview of modern art, with an emphasis on California. Yet “one of his many distinctive contributions was to attend to European painting as well as American,” according to Rinder. Along with works by many of Peter’s favorite twentieth-century artists—among them Beckmann (Woman Half-Nude at the Window, 1926), de Kooning (The Marshes, 1945), Tinguely (Black Knight, 1964), and Sam Francis (Berkeley, 1970)—appear, for example, the unexpected Pietà (1527) by Savoldo, the Rubens, and a pen-and-ink drawing of a flying female figure by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Selz, in short, took the opportunity to shape a collection that would reflect a history of art that extended back well before the modern era.
• • •
But the dream did not last long. Shortly after the move into the new building, a variety of things—not the least of which was funding support—began to deteriorate. What had started so well, “with a bang,” began to unravel from both within and without. Much of this had to do with the new administration in Sacramento and wide displeasure with the management of the state-funded University of California, in particular with the relationship of the UC regents to student activism at the various campuses, especially Berkeley. Caught in between were the chief administrators of the university. Peter’s account puts the situation in terms of his own difficulties, including loss of several important potential gifts of major collections, one of which was planned to become a UC art study center in Venice:
The thing that started to put the damper on was the [1966] election of Governor Ronald Reagan. We almost got the Peggy Guggenheim collection. A year before I came out here I was in Venice at the Biennale. [Art critic] Herbert Read and Peggy were there; we were at the beach. I knew Peggy slightly and she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my collection. My intention was to give it to the Tate, but I found out that the Italian government won’t let me take anything out over fifty years old, so it all has to stay here. . . . What should I do?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to leave the Museum of Modern Art to start a new museum . . . in California. And I have a great idea: you can gift your collection to the University of California in Berkeley and leave it all here, and it will be like I Tatti [the Bernard Berenson collection handled by Harvard], a great study center and collection in Venice. . . . And you will be the curator.” Then we corresponded more.61
Walter Horn, who of course knew from Peter of this great opportunity for the University of California, was on sabbatical in Europe at the time (1965–66), and he courted Peggy. Horn discovered that, across the street from her residence, the former American consulate building was available. Walter proceeded to sketch out a plan for dormitories and study rooms. Apparently Peggy Guggenheim was very pleased.
At about the same time, Peter went to the regents, who accepted the Guggenheim proposal, despite board art expert Norton Simon’s remarkably offhand (and uninformed) dismissal: “Well, it’s not such a great collection.” Peter was and remains incredulous: “He did say that. He did say that.” It soon becomes clear that Selz is no great admirer of Norton Simon, the latter’s stunning old-master collection notwithstanding. In connection with modern art, the formidable Simon was at the time still something of a novice.
A letter was sent to Guggenheim; she responded that she liked the proposal, and “I especially like this Walter Horn.” Peggy knew Peter but she did not know much about UC Berkeley, and she told Selz she needed to “meet his boss” before she made her decision:
So, I called Mr. Kerr and I said “Peggy wants to meet with us.” You have to remember that the whole museum was Kerr’s idea in the first place. . . . We arranged for the Kerrs and the Selzes to go to Venice, and we took Peggy out for dinner. She was enormously impressed with Clark Kerr, who would mention things like being offered a secretaryship in the Kennedy administration—I think it was Labor—and a secretaryship in the Johnson administration. And she asked him, “Why didn’t you take this?” [Kerr replied], “These things are very important, but the University of California is even more important.”62
The next morning Peggy talked further with Peter and told him this was the best proposal she had received and she was going to have her attorneys draw up papers. Having her own version of Berenson’s I Tatti was very appealing. This was the summer of 1966; in the fall the attorneys began to talk. But in November Reagan was elected, and in response to the political right wing both in the legislature and on the university’s Board of Regents, he fired Clark Kerr in January 1967. This appeared very prominently in the European press, and Selz got a call from Peggy asking, “Is this true what I read? How can I trust an institution in which things like that happen?”
She withdrew her support, saying she couldn’t stand behind a university where a great president could be fired for purely political reasons. She wanted nothing further to do with it. As for Peter, in addition to losing this prize collection and a great modern art study center, he saw a personal fantasy evaporate as well. “You see, I had envisioned that I would spend six months in Berkeley and six months in Venice. Now, what could be better?”63
Still, the Hofmann gift was a great beginning for building a serious modern art collection at Berkeley. And the later acquisition of works by various contemporary artists, predominantly local figures from exhibitions such as Funk, began to form the nucleus of a distinguished California representation. Among these artists are Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Robert Bechtle, Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Bruce Conner, and Nathan Oliveira. Selz especially remembers the fortuitous circumstances of an early William T. Wiley acquisition:
I think it was the time of the Funk show that Bill Wiley donated a painting to the museum. Some time later he wrote me a letter, telling me that he did not like the painting and asked me to destroy it! I responded that our function was to preserve, not destroy, works of art (contrary to the Tinguely episode) and that I would be glad to exchange it for a work he liked better. He said, “Okay, once you open the new building I want you to give me a space to work and I’ll paint you a new painting.” This was done. Bill painted a fine new picture. We brought out the old one, he looked at it and said it was much better than he thought. Result: the museum had two William T. Wileys.64
There were, however, more disappointments to come following Peggy Guggenheim’s withdrawal and the consequent loss of her great collection of Surrealist and related modern art: “The other great blow was that Rothko had kept paintings from the Museum of Modern Art exhibition together, and he said many times to me that he might give this group to Berkeley. But before he could do anything about that he died. At one point it looked as if, in addition to the Hofmanns, we would have a large group of Rothkos—and possibly the Guggenheim in Venice. So, not everything I tried worked.”65
After Reagan fired Kerr, new presidents took over who, according to Selz, were not much interested in the museum or art. It had been Kerr’s pet project, and without him there was no hope that the museum would be properly funded. Eventually it became a burden to the university.
The only way I could have maintained any kind of standard was to spend ninety percent of my time fundraising, as many directors do. And this I didn’t want. . . . The reason I finally left was financial. But I also found out that the art department wasn’t really backing the museum, so that source of support was never there. They had impossible ideas like doing big shows of Rubens. . . . The department was not interested in being on the cutting edge of the new, because none of my colleagues—not a one—was interested in contemporary art. . . . Herschel [Chipp] was primarily interested in early-twentieth-century art. His interest wasn’t there, and nobody was interested in things like nineteenth-century American art—they couldn’t have cared less.66
One faculty member, however, calls into question Selz’s blanket indictment of his art history colleagues’ lack of interest in the museum. James Cahill came to Berkeley from the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution at about the same time Peter arrived. He brought with him an extensive knowledge of Chinese art, for which he was renowned in academic circles, along with a personal collection, from which key works entered the museum collection. Cahill established a support group of patrons to collect major works of Asian art, notably Chinese paintings from the Sung, Yüan, Ming, and Chi’ing dynasties.67 He also initiated a series of pioneering exhibitions that grew out of his graduate seminars.
Cahill’s memory of the relationship between Selz and the art history department, one that he describes as “strange and ambiguous,” is based on firsthand observation:
In principle he was supposed to be teaching a museum-practice course, but I don’t think he ever did, or if so only a time or two. We could never work out just what form it should take, how it should relate to Bay Area museums, etc. Herschel Chipp was our modernist, but he was more traditionally art historical, working on earlier 20th-century, not contemporary—which for most faculty was a highly suspect area for art history (better journalism). Peter was [required] to come to faculty meetings, but he seldom did [Selz denies this]. And relations between him and most of the faculty were indeed very cool—most of them barely approved his museum appointment, certainly didn’t want him as an active department member.
Cahill continues his account with a description of the few attempts at collaboration between the department and museum: “For a long time, no faculty cooperated with him on an exhibition; the first, I think, was Dick Amyx in an exhibition of Greek vase painting, one of several Kress Foundation–sponsored seminar-exhibition projects [Selz points out that he got the Kress grants specifically for such collaborations]. I did another, and I think Joanna Williams did one on Indian art [Selz says not]. At exhibition openings . . . few faculty members showed up. Or such is my memory.”68
It is surprising that there was not greater support for Selz’s efforts to create a museum that served not just the art students but the broader university population, the Berkeley community, and even a national audience. Presumably everyone involved at Berkeley would recognize that as a worthy goal for the new museum. It appears that Selz was aware of the challenge to fully engage faculty, as evidenced by his designating department colleagues as subject-specialty curators. In fact, this covered the entire art history faculty at Berkeley.69 How much input they had remains a subject of disagreement. But at least Selz seems to have made the effort. Apparently, it wasn’t enough; as he recalled in 1982, “We didn’t quite see eye to eye. I didn’t have much support. . . . We had the standard kind of internal turmoil, because we all felt what we were doing was so important. . . . I was reaching my late fifties, and there were other things I wanted to do. I wanted to do more writing. I was eager to get to this book I finished just two years ago, Art in Our Times—a book . . . [that] I wanted to do more than anything, and I knew I couldn’t do it running the museum.”70
It was not just his interest in writing that led his to his resignation as director. He was also drawn by the classroom and the students, both undergraduate and graduate, whose company he so enjoyed. In fact, Professor Selz appears to have been famous with his students for his accessibility and openness to social contact outside the classroom. It may be that giving up what had become a frustrating administrative position in a fractious workplace for a full-time academic career was yet another opportunity for escape:
Eventually I said, “Well, okay, it’s about time to get somebody else to run the museum,” hoping that my resignation . . . would prompt the administration to find more money. . . . Instead they found less. In fact, they found somebody who went along with all the budget cuts, and finally almost buried the place. . . . They turned it over to [Jerry Ballaine]—a painter friend of the dean—who . . . didn’t run it very well at all. So Brenda Richardson, [by then] the chief curator, ran the thing. . . . Then after Ballaine left, the museum had no head at all for almost a year [there were several acting directors from among the art faculty]. They offered the job to a number of good people who turned it down when they saw the financial situation.71
Selz’s years as UAM founding director involved increasingly difficult relations with the administration and with at least a few of the board of regents, notably art collector Norton Simon. Simon had encouraged a number of museums—Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, Berkeley, and even the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor—to hope they might receive his stellar old-master collection. But he eventually set up at the Pasadena Museum of Art in a controversial takeover of the building that included the Galka Scheyer Blue Four collection. His record as UC regent was both good and bad, but it appears that he was not helpful to Selz on behalf of the museum.72
The two men also diverged in terms of politics and social values. An event that took place at the time of the violent confrontation at People’s Park in 1969 provides a perfect example:
The National Guard was all over Berkeley. . . . There were planes overhead spraying the demonstrators. . . . [James Rector, reportedly a student bystander, had been killed in the first confrontation, on May 15.] One solution to the standoff would have been for the city to take over the park, and the Berkeley City Council [offered to do so] if the University would deed it to them. . . . Well, Norton Simon was [at the Board meeting to discuss the proposal]. He had [with him] a transparency of a painting by Franz Marc which he was considering buying, . . . and he wanted me to look at it. We made an appointment to meet for coffee after the Regents’ meeting. At the meeting he took out this transparency and I said, “Let’s not talk about Franz Marc. I want to know, did the Regents agree to turn the park over to the city?” And he says, “No.” I said, “Why not?” And he showed me a photograph of this topless woman on the truck and he says, “We can’t have our students subjected to this kind of behavior.” He says, “Look, naked girls.” Now, naked girls are all over San Francisco and North Beach. You can see all of the naked women you ever can imagine, but he said, “We can’t have this on campus, and we turned it down. And what do you think of this Franz Marc?” “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I’m disgusted. . . . You showed me a topless woman when I talked about a man being killed.”73
Events like this one must have colored Peter’s relationship with other UC regents as well. But it was not a dramatic confrontation with Norton Simon that brought matters to a head. Instead, according to several friends and colleagues who were familiar with the situation, Peter was simply not cut out to be an administrative museum director. Later Selz provided his own amplified account:
It is certainly true that Brenda Richardson, whom I had hired and did not get along with toward the end . . . constantly undermined me. Walter Horn [head of the Museum Committee] urged me to give her the sack, but I kept her on as she was a very capable curator. She did expect to take over when I left, but I insisted that the job would go temporarily to Jim Cahill until a new director was in place. The main reason for my move from the museum to full-time faculty was, as I have mentioned before, that most of my time would have to be spent raising funds rather than curating or working on acquisitions. The funding of the Berkeley Museum was never set up correctly by the Regents. After I left, Jim Elliott set up a Board of Trustees, and the Museum began to operate almost like a private museum, raising its own money. This I did not need, as I could go back to teaching full time, which I enjoyed until the day I retired.74
Then, too, there is the fact that Peter and his staff were increasingly, as Richardson put it, “at odds.”75 An atmosphere of frustration and contention, readily acknowledged on all sides, along with the lack of administration support for the museum itself, precipitated his departure.76 There is, however, disagreement about the precise circumstances of the end of Selz’s time as director of UAM. The statements of the two main protagonists stand in direct contradiction, and Richardson challenges Peter’s version, which casts her as difficult and even insubordinate. To her surprise, she was presented with a reprimand listing charges submitted by Peter to provost and dean Roderic Park. Acting dean Richard Peters delivered the document to her home. Peter was calling for her termination. Following his instructions, she provided the lengthy and detailed response required by the university.77 Whatever the actual purpose of this document and the subsequent details of the deliberations of the dean’s committee, Peter left the museum and Brenda stayed. It appears that Brenda was in fact exonerated of the charges by the university, and she continued working at the museum for a year and a half before joining Tom Freudenheim’s staff at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The accounts of these events from various faculty and museum staff all involve what were regarded as shortcomings of Peter’s administration. The consensus is that Peter was seriously out of step with the university administration. As his successor Cahill put it, Peter “was good at making enemies.”78 Of the various accounts touching on this theme, one adheres strictly to the facts of the situation. Jacquelynn Baas became director of the museum in 1988. Avoiding the pitfalls of rancorous personal (and usually unsupported) commentary on both sides of the issue, her brief account puts the events in a larger university perspective: “The ‘bottom line,’ so to speak, would seem to have been the fact that, despite regular infusions of cash on the part of the University for acquisitions, etc., the museum ran major deficits every year Peter was in charge—something that simply could not continue.”79 Tom Freudenheim, a supportive friend of Peter’s to this day, also takes a balanced position in regard to the factors that brought an end to the Selz era at UAM. He acknowledges that he had left for the directorship at Baltimore before the “Peter/Brenda problems arose.” Having later hired Richardson to join him, he essentially echoes Peter’s initial positive view of her abilities with his own description: “I did, happily, bring Brenda to Baltimore, where we had a very close and productive working relationship. She is exceptionally able.” Still, his observation of her fundamental working style echoes that of her former boss, Peter Selz: “She wasn’t into worrying about making friends or offending people, if her principles were at stake.”80
From this and similar accounts of infighting, one could reasonably conclude that the university had lost patience with the museum. As Jacquelynn Baas recalls, “I know Jim Elliott suffered from this, and I was still dealing with the after-effects some fifteen years later.”81 Regardless of the internal staff problems and differences between individuals, lax financial management brought down the director, as it often has elsewhere. Fortunately for him, he was hired with tenure and accordingly was able to realize his expressed desires for teaching and writing.
Selz’s tenure as founding director of the University Art Museum lasted seven years, exactly the duration spent at the Museum of Modern Art. His friend Richard Buxbaum, law professor at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, sums up qualities that have followed Selz throughout his professional and political life:
Peter is not a man whom administrators can administrate. And as a result, to this day his splendid accomplishments in bringing [the Berkeley Art Museum]—both the building and the profile—to national attention have not been rewarded as they might well have been. And while this is only speculation, I would guess that for the two art departments, practice as well as history, having someone like Peter (and indeed perhaps anyone with a similar “outside” background) come into the essentially self-referential academic world—no matter how intellectually vital that departmental world may well be—also cannot be an easy or comfortable situation. That likely is a structural issue, but some personalities might try to adapt to such a setting—not Peter Selz!82