Peter Selz’s personal life took a new turn shortly before his retirement when, on 18 December 1983, he married his fifth wife, Carole Schemmerling.1 Throughout Peter’s long journey, women have played a central role. His interest in women is practically legendary, and over the years he has had many relationships—some supportive, others combative; some brief and forgettable, others enduring and profound. What they have in common is not the nature of the connection—whether personal, professional, or familial—but a pattern of dependency that has in part defined Peter’s life and career. During the retirement years, Carole, more than any other, has knowingly both challenged and enabled him. His prodigious output would have been impossible without her willingness to support and facilitate these last three decades of his remarkably productive career.
With the marriage and the joining of their two families came a new domestic scene for Peter. Carole brought daughters Mia and Kryssa, ages twenty-three and twenty at the time. In addition, there was Kevin Cox, an African American foster son who had been with Carole’s family for seven years. His mother had died in a fire in 1975 when Kevin was sixteen, and Mia brought home her classmate, asking if he could come live with them. She announced to Carole and her then husband that “Kevin needs a mother. Doesn’t that make your heart cry?”2 Carole said yes, it did, and agreed to take him in. Peter’s daughters, Tanya and Gabrielle, then ages twenty-three and twenty-two, though out of college and living on their own, were still “very dependent upon Peter.”3 Both would continue to spend time in Berkeley with their father and new stepmother. Eventually there were four grandchildren: Mia and Justin Baldwin’s daughters, Kyra and Rian; Kryssa Schemmerling and David Rawson’s son, Wyatt; and Gaby and ex-husband Bogdon Mync’s son, Theo. This is Peter’s present family configuration, which allows him the pleasures of being a grandparent.
Fifteen years Peter’s junior, Carole is intelligent, politically active, socially committed, and an authentic denizen of the art world, in many respects the ideal marriage partner for Peter (see Figs. 24, 25). With her background in the Los Angeles art world—she was particularly close to several artists of the Ferus Gallery,4 which Peter had found so interesting when at Pomona—and her contact in San Francisco with the Dilexi Gallery circle, she brought to the relationship sophistication and an independent nature. These qualities have served her well in dealing with her husband’s powerful (and controlling) personality. She remains very much her own person.
Peter and Carole met in November 1979 at a restaurant following a movie that she had attended with architectural critic Alan Temko and his wife, Becky. Alan saw Peter and called him over to their table; after coffee Carole gave him a ride home. What followed was a determined courtship by Peter, but, partly due to their age difference, Carole was “not interested.”5 Furthermore, mutual friends, the artist Hassel Smith and his wife, Donna, warned Carole that Peter was “untrustworthy” when it came to women.6 Peter persisted in his campaign, however (he commenced by sending her a book on American cartoons—an original offering—which he took back a week later, saying it was his last copy). Three years later she capitulated and moved in. Carole was aware of Peter’s reputation regarding women, but something drew her to him. On one level the attraction was what endeared him to many of his students: personal charm, knowledge and love of art, and a fondness for artists, which she shared. And, she confided, she imagined that he was in fact “malleable.”7 She would surely deny that she ever considered him a mentor, but his prominence in the art world promised an interesting life, one that suited her. Furthermore, her children were nervous about her single-woman status.8
By the time Peter retired in 1988, he and Carole had been living for six years on Regal Road in the high-modernist house designed by Berkeley architect Donald Olsen (who had been a student of Walter Gropius and had worked with Eero Saarinen). The International Style house was commissioned by Peter as the realization of a youthful dream—born of his first experience of modern architecture in Stuttgart in the 1930s.9 Carole had become the facilitator of their very active social life, entertaining in this open and art-filled home. She seems to have understood this to be part of her role, one that she graciously performs to this day. In fact, many friends of the couple credit Carole with a noticeable and positive moderating effect on her husband. Her response by way of explanation is that she is Peter’s firmest critic, calling him, as she puts it, on relationships with other people and even challenging his judgments on art and artists.10 Peter had not experienced this kind of scrutiny and direct critical feedback since Thalia, if then.
Despite the demands of her own grassroots environmental work— most notably urban creek restoration11—Carole accompanies Peter on their frequent forays into the Berkeley art world and across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. She also manages his busy travel schedule to Los Angeles, New York, and Europe, a pattern that has not slowed. Carole goes along on the more attractive of these excursions, such as the visits to Paris and Giverny in the summer of 2000. The highlight of that adventure included an expensive cab ride to Milly-la-Forêt in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where they hiked to Tinguely’s Cyclops installation.
• • •
Peter Selz’s departure from academic life, along with Carole’s one-person spousal support system, has allowed him to become more involved with art galleries, which pleases him and must raise pleasant memories of his first New York years and the 57th Street galleries, not to mention his early art education in his grandfather’s art and antiques emporium. The art journey has thus come full circle. University colleagues may disapprove of this commercial association, but Peter has characteristically found new opportunities to explore and express his fundamental interests. He loves the pursuit, discovery, and introduction of new art and artists, which happens more regularly in galleries than in museums. Selz still thrives on that “rush” of discovery.
Prominent among the gallery directors with whom he has associated over recent years, putting together shows and writing numerous catalogue essays, are Achim Moeller and Michael Rosenfeld (New York); Paula Kirkeby (Palo Alto, California); Jack Rutberg (Los Angeles); Tracy Freedman, George Krevsky, and Martin Muller (San Francisco); Barry Sakata (Sacramento); and the Alphonse Berber Gallery (Berkeley), which mounted in late 2009 a tribute to Peter titled New Images of Man and Woman. Other gallery associations include ACA and Gallery St. Etienne (New York) and Tasende Gallery (Los Angeles and La Jolla, California). In 1991 Selz put together an exhibition for Larry Gagosian, perhaps the most visible exemplar of the supreme power of the New York art market that Peter so vocally deplored just before he left MoMA for Berkeley. The draw, however, was the opportunity to present work that he believed in by an artist to whom he is devoted. Gagosian Gallery provided a high-profile venue for Sam Francis, Blue Balls. In 2010, Peter accepted an invitation from Jonathan Clark & Co. to write a short essay for the catalogue of an upcoming Eduardo Paolozzi exhibition in London. In addition, the gallery plans to reproduce Peter’s introduction to New Images of Man, the MoMA exhibition for which he is perhaps best remembered.12
Alongside these commercial forays, Selz has devoted much time and energy to galleries that are nonprofit institutions, serving on the boards of and organizing exhibitions for Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, Kala Institute in Berkeley, Neue Galerie in New York, and, above all, Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Many of the shows he has undertaken during retirement are done pro bono. Peter finds it difficult to turn down projects that capture his fancy or provide him an opportunity to revisit old enthusiasms—as in recent exhibitions of Stephen De Staebler (Graduate Theological Union, 2007), Richard Lindner (Krevsky Gallery, 2009), and Robert Colescott (Meridian Gallery, 2009). In 1994, Peter was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Study Center to work on the catalogue for the 1996 Richard Lindner retrospective at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. His interest in Lindner goes back well before that exhibition, however. Always adopting a contrary position, Selz rejects the notion of Lindner as a Pop artist, connecting him instead with German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Lindner’s predecessors, in Peter’s view, were Christian Schad and Oskar Schlemmer.13
The Colescott show, along with a 2010 Morris Graves retrospective, also at Meridian Gallery, celebrates Peter’s unstinting dedication to artists who matter but do not get the attention he feels they deserve. Anne Brodzky, director of Meridian, was determined to present an exhibition of the brilliant African American satirist Robert Colescott. She easily engaged Peter’s participation, who then persuaded Daniell Cornell, at that time the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s contemporary art specialist, to bring it all together. Peter had wanted for years to do a significant Graves exhibition, and Meridian also provided that opportunity.
Selz was working on the exhibition and catalogue for an Irving Petlin show that was planned for 2009 at the Pennsylvania Academy, but with a change of directorship the project was canceled. Peter was deeply disappointed because, as he said, “I really believe in this work.” Petlin’s work was, however, shown in three simultaneous gallery exhibitions in New York in 2010, and Peter wrote a feature article about him that appeared in the March 2010 issue of Art in America. With his opening lines, Selz encapsulates the main thrust of two careers, the artist’s and his own: “For more than fifty years, Irving Petlin has remained a steadfast proponent of art as both a moral and esthetic enterprise. It is his conviction that the task of the artist is to transmit this sense of commitment to the world.”14
Perhaps Selz’s greatest accomplishment during his retirement years, certainly from a politically engaged perspective, is the role he played in bringing Fernando Botero’s controversial Abu Ghraib series into the permanent collection of what in 1996 became the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM). According to Peter, he first saw the paintings and drawings in 2006 at Marlborough Gallery in New York: “Like many others, I was impressed by the ‘Guernica of our time.’” When it was initially offered to Berkeley for exhibition the following year, BAM director Kevin Consey declined because the schedule was full. The Center for Latin American Studies converted a former computer room in the university’s Doe Library and displayed the works from 29 January to 23 March 2007, attracting a large attendance before the series went on to Europe. Not wanting to profit in any way from American torture, Botero offered to give the entire 105 works to Berkeley.15 Consey took the position that they did not “come up to the standards of the Berkeley Art Museum.” Professor Harley Shaiken, head of the Center for Latin American Studies, contacted Peter, who intervened with the chancellor’s office—and the works were accepted. According to Selz, Consey was fired because of his stand on the Botero offer.16 His successor, Lawrence Rinder, installed a temporary exhibition in 2009–10, and the series now stands as a significant gift to BAM. Selz views the Botero works as a bookend to the famous Hans Hofmann collection, and the two as complementary parts of his legacy to the museum, representing two faces of modernist art.
All these projects have one thing in common: they represent themes, ideas, artists, and directions that have preoccupied Selz from the beginning of his career. For example, in 1989 Peter teamed up with his long-time friend Dore Ashton to co-curate Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic for Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum. The exhibition, introducing work that had been ignored in the West, opened on the very day the Berlin Wall came down.
These postretirement activities all feed into Selz’s particular modernistart worldview and his construction of a critical and historical edifice for the themes that inspire him. The key building blocks all have to do with the human condition: political engagement, subjectivity and emotion, “peripheral” and unacknowledged artistic vision, and, above all, human presence, whether representational (the human figure) or abstract. These Selz leitmotifs, if we can call them that, are demonstrated in one way or another in the work of all of Peter’s favorite artists.
The dedication and loyalty Selz bestows upon these chosen artists could be described more accurately as passion than as simple enthusiasm. Such is the case with the Spaniard Eduardo Chillida, whom he ranks as among the leading sculptors of the twentieth century, “as important as David Smith.”17 Thanks in part to Agnes Denes, who encouraged Peter to explore more thoroughly the conceptual foundations of art, he was able to develop a deep appreciation of Chillida’s great public site-specific creations. Selz recalls attending a talk Chillida gave at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in the late 1990s. The artist was being considered for a major commission, a sculpture to be placed opposite the museum entrance on a site with a sweeping view of the Golden Gate and its vermilion bridge, and beyond to the Marin Headlands. If Chillida had been selected, his piece would no doubt have created a powerful physical and visual connection between people and their environment, built and natural.
In his book Beyond the Mainstream—of which, among his many publications, he seems to be especially proud—Selz makes a distinction between modernist sculpture that is self-referential and that which, like Chillida’s, performs a meaningful social function, being at once site-specific and universal: “Public sculpture has become an increasingly important aspect of Chillida’s oeuvre. His public works relate to landscape or city and transform their sites into aesthetically valid environments. Although in the tradition of abstract sculpture, they have become meaningful place markers. The master sculptor assumes a social role, giving aesthetic definition to places of human interaction.”18 This, Peter notes, is Chillida’s strength: his work in the public domain “comes to full life only when it enters into a dialogue with the people for whom it was made.”19
Chillida was in the running for the San Francisco commission after Richard Serra withdrew because the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco could not accept Serra’s condition that the sculpture never be moved (the Museums do not own the land; it belongs to the city). As things turned out, Chillida did not make a proposal, and a work by Mark di Suvero was installed in the choice location. One cannot help but consider this with regret, given the aggressive quality of what now stands in splendid, almost defiant, isolation, calling attention mainly to itself.20
This is a critique of modernist sculpture that Selz has made consistently. His short list of exceptions includes specific works by Brancusi, Giacometti, Miró, Dubuffet, and Noguchi and a few “memorable” temporary installations, such as David Smith’s Festival of Two Worlds offering at Spoleto, Italy, in 1962 and Christo’s Running Fence in Marin and Sonoma counties. But above all, in terms of an ecological awareness as part of humanist concerns, Chillida’s Wind Combs of 1977 represents for Selz the fully realized ideal of a social, philosophical—and sophisticated—political art. Erected on a formerly inaccessible piece of rocky Basque coast on the western edge of Chillida’s native San Sebastián, Wind Combs creates in art a perfect union of land, water, and air. A precipitous site overlooking the ocean is transformed into a public plaza where visitors view, experience, and interact with one another and the sculpture. The entire creation speaks eloquently of the profound human relationship to nature and the importance of having places where that relationship is, through art, recognized. Echoing his subject’s stated objectives, Selz described three sited sculptures, each thoughtfully placed as representatives of the three elements, standing at the edge of the city where the Pyrenees meet—literally rise from—the Atlantic Ocean. The trio, Selz wrote in 1986, makes for “one of the most magnificent modern sculptures in the public area.”21 Twenty-three years later in an interview, he reiterated that assessment: “Wind Combs is one of the greatest works of art done out in nature.”22
To his credit, Selz knew firsthand of what he wrote. On a 1988 trip to Spain, he and Carole met Herschel Chipp in San Sebastián, purposefully to revisit (the Selzes had been twice before) Chillida’s masterpiece. The three Californians and the sculptor were photographed at this great site (see Fig. 21). But there is more to the story. The Selzes and Chipp also convened in Guernica for the dedication of a memorial sculpture by Chillida on 26 April 1988, the fifty-first anniversary of the German Condor Legion’s bombing of the town. That bombing, of course, had led to another masterpiece, Picasso’s Guernica, a key monument in the history of art. Chipp’s exhaustive study of Guernica, based on conversations with Picasso and some of the many women in his life, appeared the same year.23 Professor Chipp, at the invitation of the Basque government (an invitation that Selz says he facilitated), addressed the people of Guernica, saying a few well-chosen and well-received words in Basque to honor the survivors of the bombing and their descendants.24
When it comes to art, Peter Selz always makes sure he is present and accounted for, a habit that has impressed many colleagues who lack his energy and that endears him to a younger generation of artists. Peter feels that he is part of modern art history. Of course he would be in Guernica for Chillida—but also to support his Berkeley colleague, whom he had known since the late 1950s (Peter called Herschel and Walter Horn his only true friends on the Berkeley art history faculty). But he was also drawn by the huge artistic and political significance of the day and the place. Two years earlier, he had visited San Sebastián to honor Chillida as well. It is finally a matter of life priorities—how he wants to be, and be perceived, in his world. Selz continues, throughout his retirement, to give priority to the people and events—and the art—of the creative world in which he has formed his own American identity.
Peter Selz, in his writing and curatorial endeavors, expresses strong feelings about the artists he favors. In his retirement years he has been largely free to pick and choose, and in doing so he has formed close personal relationships with his subjects. And these have not been limited to living artists. He considers, for example, Ferdinand Hodler and Lyonel Feininger “close to my heart,”25 though the greatest attachment of all is Goya, followed by his other all-time favorites, Max Beckmann, Mark Rothko, and Sam Francis. He has been typically most devoted to, and emotionally invested in, artists whose work places them outside the mainstream. His commitment to artists and movements that he feels have been insufficiently recognized is the hallmark of his long career.
San Francisco artist Carlos Villa, a noted activist and champion of multicultural diversity, described as well as anyone Peter’s impact on and contribution to the Bay Area art scene and, above all, the artists. He recalls how Peter Selz quickly attached himself to the bohemian artist crowd that gathered around Pete Voulkos at his studio by the railroad tracks on Gilman Street in west Berkeley. For ten years, everybody knew that there would always be a party there, around the clock. “Pete would be gambling, doing coke,” and holding court: “Pete Voulkos was the man.” And Carlos considered Pete (along with his other mentor, Harold Paris) one of his best friends. He also came to admire Selz, in no small part because the art historian had chosen his world: “Pete [Voulkos] was head of the sculpture department, and he would have his faculty meetings after a poker session. He didn’t even have to go to school to get a salary. And Peter Selz had to have gotten swept up with the tide. He could not have been the ruler of the [Bay Area art] world in his new museum without being side by side with Pete Voulkos.” He added, “You know, the thing was that Peter Selz was very much part of the art scene. He wanted to be not necessarily the anchor, but he definitely was part of the underpinning.”
Carlos went on to express admiration for Selz’s insistence on pursuing his own new regional view—notably by creating his personal Funk “kingdom” as a way to identify what is original about the Bay Area: “Peter had his own view. He had his own lens . . . to what everything was. And that’s what made the Funk show.” Peter wanted to be authentically part of the local art scene. In that, his interests seemed to Villa to go well beyond personal and professional ambition. And his political interests are authentic, providing the willingness to look past his learned Euro-American prejudices about the idea of the “other.” Villa credits Selz with being one of the most open of art historians around, one who goes beyond stylistic and formal issues: “It isn’t the idea of ‘isms’ . . . or whether or not figurative art is more eternal or more humanistic—as opposed to de Kooning making marks. It’s not about that anymore. It’s about the immersion in the human spirit.”26
Given their deep commitment to group and individual diversity, it carries considerable weight when politically sophisticated artists such as Carlos Villa—joined by Rupert Garcia, Enrique Chagoya, and others— use the words generous and inclusive to characterize Peter Selz’s approach to art and artists.27 Chagoya sums up the sentiment and expresses gratitude for Peter’s contribution: “In the Bay Area I feel a sense of belonging to a community of artists, dealers, writers, and cultural activists unique in the world. Many come and go, but what really matters is that some of them devote the time and energy to record and analyze artistic events and their connection to the social and political context. Peter, in his research and writing, is the kind of historian who has continued to do just that important task. For his dedication of mind, and especially his appreciation of individual artists, Peter is most special to all of us.”28
Villa, Chagoya, and Garcia, like Chillida in Spain, attract Peter with their social and political ideals and commitment. As it turns out, Garcia is one of the most enlightening exemplars of the union between Selz’s ideas and the artists he writes about. In Beyond the Mainstream, Peter begins his discussion of Garcia by quoting and then providing a rejoinder to a Hilton Kramer review in the New Criterion in which, in Selz’s words, Kramer takes “umbrage with a number of political exhibitions and publications.”29 Although Kramer’s hostility toward left-wing political art is not directed at Rupert Garcia per se, it would certainly include the artist’s well-known graphic statements such as Attica Is Fascismo (1971) and ¡Fuera de Indochina! (1970). Kramer takes a staunchly negative position on the question of whether moral and political opinions have a place in making art: “We are once again being exhorted to abandon artistic criteria and aesthetic considerations in favor of ideological tests that would . . . reduce the whole notion of art to little more than a facile, pre-programmed exercise in political propaganda.”30 To this Selz responds with his own question: “Does Mr. Kramer, a most political animal himself, actually believe that artists can live and work in total isolation from the political context? What are these ‘artistic criteria and aesthetic considerations’? And what was Mr. Kramer’s own socio-political milieu in which he acquired his ultra-conservative views?”31
This is classic political Selz, an absolute and unbending position, which one sympathetic UC Berkeley colleague, law professor Richard Buxbaum, describes—with more than a bit of liberal admiration—as “his unambiguous approach, that black-and-white bluntness of vision.”32 Garcia himself, however, in talking about his studies and eventual collegial friendship with Selz, downplays, almost ignores, the political component that is the focus of Peter’s writing about him. Instead he sees it as a kind of “progressive” intelligence which they naturally share—and if Peter did not care about such things, Rupert declares, “I wouldn’t waste my time.”33 His view of their friendship, why they are important to each other, is actually more nuanced than Peter’s emphasis on the political “bond.” Garcia’s affection for Peter comes from a different place.
Rupert came to Berkeley in 1973 to earn a Ph.D. in art education. When he took a course with Peter Selz, however, he decided to switch to art history. Peter supported his application and he was admitted. He took seminars from Selz and Herschel Chipp, and in the process “got to know them well. The relationship with Herschel was intense, but it was cool. And then with Peter it was intense and warm.”34
As much as he enjoyed the academic life, Garcia finally had to make a choice between being an artist and writing a thesis.35 Being an artist won out, a decision that both Selz and Chipp supported—which Rupert interprets as coming from “trust” based on his performance in seminars. Rupert remembers the first time Peter and he interacted outside the classroom, at a symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art about art and social engagement. Rupert criticized a statement Peter made about artists in general, ignoring the fact that, in Rupert’s words, “white artists do something, and it’s considered profound. But when artists of color do something, it’s considered to be culturally bound. I was thinking, what’s with this double standard, man? It was the real world, real life, and Peter never shied away.” Rupert looks to that exchange as the beginning of their relationship: “Real friendships are built upon being open to criticism and not taking umbrage against the other person, saying, ‘You’re out of my life because you don’t agree with me.’”36 At that point, Garcia said, he and Selz were establishing a connection based on intellectual and creative equality. That was important to Rupert, but he is a realist: “I mean, it would be folly to have great expectations of someone like Peter. I have great expectations for myself, but for nobody else.”37
Rupert came to appreciate Selz’s importance beyond the classroom, and specifically to the Bay Area:
I would say that later in his career when he started to get involved with local artists, I cared [more] about him. Previously I only cared about him because of the book on German Expressionism. That’s a fabulous piece of work. I really love that book. So I always knew this guy was very serious. I knew that he was here and that he was at MoMA, and he did New Images of Man. That was a fantastic thing to have done—he brought that with him. So I knew there was this stimulating mind and presence in the Bay Area.38
Despite his independence and artistic self-reliance, Garcia is grateful that Peter wrote favorably about his work in several publications, including Art of Engagement (2006), one of Selz’s two major books of recent years and the culmination of a career-long dedication to political art in the service of humanity. This supportive friendship continues right up to the present. Peter offered to read the manuscript for Garcia’s proposed book on Surrealism and Mexican modern painting. Even though sometime earlier he had observed that he was “running out of steam,” he read the entire manuscript. “He edited the whole damn thing,” said Rupert. “Every page, even the notes.”39 Rupert ended by saying, “Peter is a friend. I consider him my friend. I can talk to him about anything, say anything I want. I feel no need to edit when I talk to him. And I call about anything that I think is important.”40
Anne Brodzky of Meridian Gallery in San Francisco is another sympathetic colleague, similarly dedicated to progressive goals and humanist values. She and Peter share a deep rapport, one that underlies their collaboration at the nonprofit gallery. In 2005 he joined the board of the Society for Art Publications of the Americas, the nonprofit parent of Meridian Gallery and its innovative program of new music concerts and internships for at-risk, inner-city teens. Located in new quarters in downtown San Francisco, Meridian has an ambitious exhibition program that draws heavily on the knowledge and experience of Peter Selz. Starting in 1995 with a nationwide traveling exhibition, About Drawing, Peter has organized shows of the work of Robert Kostka, Robert Colescott, and Kevan Jenson, as well as a Morris Graves exhibition that was on view in the spring of 2010. Brodzky speaks fondly of her association with Selz:
I’ve worked formally and informally with Peter Selz since our mutual friend Dore Ashton brought us together in the early 1980s. As my mentor, Peter continues to challenge my assumptions about seeing, particularly when it comes to direct work with him on an exhibition. His swift calls are always the adroit, the telling, ones. Peter has continued to provide guidance to the director and staff, to curate shows and produce catalogues for each of the exhibitions at Meridian’s Powell Street location. Above all there is a stunning shared congruence between the gallery’s mission and Peter’s belief in cultural diversity and the power of significant art to effect change.41
Selz’s retirement activities, his writing and exhibitions, and his attraction to individual artists are in large part determined by political considerations. But this is not to be understood in a narrow polemical or activist sense. Peter’s political view encompasses much more, really constituting a philosophy of life that he applies to art. For him, art must somehow tap into the human spirit. Certainly artists like Rupert Garcia and gallery directors like Anne Brodzky, firmly committed to social change, comfortably meet that requirement. But what of other Selz favorites, such as artists Sam Francis and Nathan Oliveira, Californians whose work is not overtly political? Francis could easily be described as a formalist, a quality that Selz holds as suspect. In his view, formalist art typically lacks human presence. Nonetheless, Sam Francis (see Fig. 20) figured among Peter’s closest friends and is the subject of one of his major monographs. Dore Ashton describes Sam Francis (Abrams, 1975, rev. ed. 1982), along with his studies on Chillida and Beckmann, as “indispensable to art historians and those who desire to know.”42 Speaking about Peter’s writing, Ashton further clarifies Peter’s unique political-cum-philosophical position, one that encompassed artists representing a broad range of subjects and styles: “I could never write about Mel Ramos, for instance. To me he’s just a Pop artist—and Pop is not interesting to me. But Peter can, if he’s talking about social, political, and cultural aspects of a subject. And that’s what he did in Art of Engagement. . . . But he’s done very good work other than that, like the monograph on Sam Francis. I think it is excellent.”43
Still, the question remains: just how does Sam Francis fit into the Selz idea of significant art? Fortunately, Peter himself provides a partially satisfying answer in his account of his planned retrospective at MoMA. “Why Sam? Because I thought his work was truly beautiful. The whole strong feeling for color. They talked about color painting later on. But at the time it really was this essence of the soul of color, and the color of soul. I felt his paintings were just a great pleasure to look at—which was the opposite of what I presented in New Images of Man.”44 Yet “beauty” can, in capable hands, skillfully disguise the merely “decorative,” something Selz disdains as eliminating the human presence or, put another way, the realm of ideas. But as he goes on, his reasoning becomes clearer: “Abrams [the publisher] wanted to do a book on Sam Francis. I wondered why has Sam, who is acknowledged in Japan as one of the great painters of our time, received little recognition in his own country— even been ignored? Why do his canvases hang more prominently in museums in Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Basel, and Berlin than in American museums?”45
In his monograph, Peter saved that question for the final chapter, where he attempted a response beyond the more obvious, and cynical, explanation that Sam Francis had a prosperous Japanese father-in-law and had resided in Japan for a while, and so enjoyed easier access to the Japanese art market. Peter’s own answer to his question touches on seemingly unrelated, but very important, issues about American culture that, to a degree, still set us apart—almost schizophrenically—from the rest of the world. Maybe these issues are part of Peter Selz’s larger “political” agenda. “What I suggested in the final chapter is that the simple beauty of his [Francis’s] work did not appeal so very much to America. We can [appreciate] Dante’s Inferno much more readily than his Paradiso, and Beethoven has always been more popular than Mozart. The sheer idea of beauty and pleasure has been put down to some extent by American Protestant culture.” Peter concludes with his overall assessment of the book: “This was a beautiful book, perhaps the most beautiful book I’ve ever done.”46 From a Selzian political imperative, perhaps it is appropriate to introduce the idea of a “politics of beauty” or “political aesthetics.”
Peter relates with fond pleasure his acquisition of the large Sam Francis painting that hangs above his sofa, dominating the north wall and the entire living room with its powerful colors:
We were doing the book, back and forth. I spent a lot of time working with Sam in Los Angeles and sometimes up here. We became very good friends. I told him about this modern dream house I hoped to build: “Well, the last plan is terrific, but I don’t think I can afford it.”
And Sam said, “You really want to do it? Will it have a large wall?”
I answered “Yes, one is planned.”
Sam said, “Well in that case if you build the house you can select a painting of mine to put on that wall.”
I selected it and lived with it untitled for a long time. There was a demand for a big exhibition and Sam was sitting on this couch: “I think we should give this picture a title to go with the exhibition.”
He thought for a while, looked at it, and said: “Let’s call it Iris. Not the girl’s name but the eye—the open eye.”47
Although Nathan Oliveira was just as far removed from politics as Sam Francis was,48 Oliveira’s influences and vision lie very close to those of his friend Peter Selz, and with him it is easier to see the connection between artist and writer, which are made even more apparent in Selz’s 2002 book Nathan Oliveira. In fact, Oliveira and Selz fit together in several ways. Oliveira shared Peter’s affinities for Goya and German Expressionism, which were important sources for his art. Max Beckmann, Peter’s touchstone, was a major influence on Oliveira, as was Symbolist ambiguity, as in, especially, Odilon Redon. Some of Oliveira’s best work, notably his monotypes, derives directly from these sources, which are among Peter’s great interests. Understated and mysterious, such images speak to the spiritual qualities that Peter includes within a greater understanding of politics and ideological values. Under this particular construction, the big idea is to use the means available to change perception and the way people engage the world. But is it political? Well, just possibly—at least in Peter Selz’s worldview.
Oliveira’s interests did indeed parallel Peter’s, as both acknowledged. Oliveira saw his project as centered in and around humanist expressionism, with Germany and the painters Selz so admired as a starting point: “Whether it was Beckmann or the German Expressionists, or Giacometti, eventually Peter could attach his views to these people. And certainly I shared that sympathy with him. I wasn’t as obvious with the politics as he was, but certainly the ‘humanization’—the humanist expression of what I was doing—was enough for him. The fact that the figures in my work were not just painted figures but about something. Loneliness— some kind of internal aloneness. Isolation. Yes, the existential condition. I think that appealed to him. And that’s the way Peter interprets my work.”49 Writing in Nathan Oliveira, Selz echoes his subject’s words by placing his work squarely within tradition, with constant reference to the great expressive achievements of the past. In this Oliveira occupies the creative space that most attracts Selz and informs his view of modernism within a historic framework:
Nathan Oliveira has not sought dramatic change in his art. Instead, his passion is for continuing an inner-directed artistic tradition attached to the human subject. His art represents a response [italics added] to artists, both past and present, an ongoing dialogue with artists from Rembrandt and Goya to Munch, Beckmann, Giacometti, and de Kooning—whom he recognizes for their insights into the human condition using the visual means at the painter’s disposal. The evocation of mystery that the viewer experiences . . . derives from a depth of feeling refracted through artistic tradition and transmitted to the spectator by the artist’s hand.50
This apparent resistance to change (at least for its own sake) and actively looking to the past for inspiration and expressive forms would seem, to some, to run counter to the modernist credo that we must break with the past. However, Oliveira’s original interpretation of his influences and sources seems to have freed him to create his own “modernist” figuration, in practice giving form and tangible substance to Selz’s ideas. No wonder the two appreciated and admired each other.
Oliveira, in an early interview that Selz quotes in his monograph, acknowledges his artistic debts while endeavoring to explain his objectives. Listing the artists above along with other important influences, Oliveira proceeds to describe his tradition-derived modernist position:
Goya, Beckmann . . . all these artists, really make up part of me . . . I’m not interested in altering the course of the art world, to be so current, so immediately at the leading edge. . . . I readily admit my influences and those people who are important to me, and in some sense, I’m a composite, as are all artists who are really good. . . . I happen to choose those artists who deal with mystery and if you want to call it that, the supernatural . . . those elements of great mysterious forces—not that I actuate them—but I think of painting as a vehicle. Visual art is a vehicle for creating worlds that are non-existent.51
Finally, Oliveira explains the course of Peter’s life journey in terms of creative life force. According to Nathan, people—women especially— provide the energy that fuels this force and the artistic productivity that results, a phenomenon with which he personally identifies.52 Despite the “handmaiden” connotations, the notion that the woman’s role is to enable greatness in men—the idea of the muse—dies hard.
• • •
Peter Selz’s unflagging loyalty to the art and artists and the ideas in which he believes remains consistent. Oliveira pinpointed it: “He maintains that loyalty. It’s something that is unshakable with him. He’s like a bulldog. That’s one of the great, endearing qualities with Peter.”53 The same can be said of his loyalty to his earlier writing and exhibition subjects, especially their historical, national, and political components. And as with Sam Francis and Nathan Oliveira, Peter’s enthusiasms are often enabled and supported by enlightened art dealers. Among the most important in that respect is Paula Kirkeby, director of Smith-Andersen Gallery with its associated graphics shop. Kirkeby also played a key role in the career of Sam Francis, whom she represented for twenty-five years. Paula thinks of these three closely interconnected friends—Selz, Francis, and Oliveira—in the fondest personal terms. As she recalls in a 2010 e-mail: “In 1969 I opened my first exhibit of Oliveira’s monotypes. Peter Selz was right there to see them, as always very enthusiastic. I knew Peter through Adja Yunkers [Dore Ashton’s first husband], so there was a small relationship between us prior to the Oliveira show.”54
She goes on to tell of an early interaction between Peter and Nathan: “I remember a party at our house, lots of Stanford people, Nate included as well as Peter. One of them was wearing a red shirt, I think it was Nate. Peter said he liked the shirt and the next thing I knew they disappeared and returned to the party with Peter wearing the red shirt and Nate Peter’s shirt! They were reliably playful guests.”
Paula also remembers the more unlikely connection between Sam Francis and Peter: “Sam Francis and Peter were very close. Whenever Sam and family were around, Peter was always there. I always felt it was more about family than anything else.”
She concludes by saying: “On different occasions, either here [Bay Area] or in Los Angeles, when I would go to museums or galleries with Peter, people would recognize him and come and say hello. Some were young unknown artists or students, and Peter was unbelievable with them. . . . He had the time and interest. Wonderful quality in someone who had tremendous power in the art world.”
Another important ongoing gallery connection is Jack Rutberg Fine Arts on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Selz and Rutberg have a rapport that embraces not only their interest in individual artists, but also, and perhaps even more so, the political and social passions that these artists manifest. In that respect, there could hardly be a more powerful example than the Swiss American artist Hans Burkhardt (see Fig. 22). When Rutberg first met Peter in the early 1980s, he had already been representing Burkhardt for about a decade, convinced that Hans was “among the most extraordinary painters of our time.”55 Peter had a limited awareness of Burkhardt, but no real exposure to his work. Hans Burkhardt was not just a Los Angeles–based artist; he had New York credentials also as a studio mate of Arshile Gorky from 1928 to 1937. Willem de Kooning visited frequently. Burkhardt, however, seems to have been the cannier of the two, being careful as he swept the studio floor at the end of the day to save the rejected drawings that had been tossed aside. Burkhardt arrived in Los Angeles in 1937 with the largest collection of early Gorky works outside the artist’s own holdings.
Carole long before had tried to interest Peter in Burkhardt; she had some of his political posters, and her mother was a neighbor of his in the Hollywood Hills. But finally it was Rutberg who brought Peter to Hans’s Jewett Drive studio to see the sixty paintings composing the Desert Storm series, his response to the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91. Peter was astounded by his first meeting with the artist. It seemed almost unfathomable that Hans, at age eighty-six, could have created the works in the span of a few months. But Peter understood such passion and immediately set about making it known. The first step was to read a paper at the International Congress of Art Critics titled “The Stars and Stripes: Johns to Burkhardt.” Anthologized in Beyond the Mainstream, the essay served as the text for Hans Burkhardt: Desert Storms, the 1991 exhibition at Rutberg’s gallery. Peter, with his friend and, in this case, accomplice, Jack Rutberg, set out to retrieve an accomplished artist and powerful political voice from relative obscurity. Included in that effort was another Desert Storms exhibition at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
Rutberg recalls attending the exhibition of treasures from the Hermitage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with Peter: “The excitement of discovery was animated and contagious as we moved through the exhibition discussing and critiquing works. We turned a corner and came upon a small Van Gogh painting of prisoners in a courtyard. It was a magical moment for Peter. This painting . . . was the very image in a postcard that Peter, as a young boy in Munich, so loved and had pinned to his bedroom wall some eight decades earlier.” In 2000, Peter and Jack attended the LACMA opening of Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000. According to the official statement of purpose for this ambitious exhibition, it “would not be a traditional art historical survey, nor would it attempt to establish a new canon or identify certain types of artistic production as distinctively ‘Californian.’ Rather, it would investigate the relationship of art to the image of California and to the region’s social and political history.”56 This thematic promise raised high expectations, and the history of the show’s reception was largely one of disappointment, despite the enormous staff effort and a degree of democratic process involved in early conceptualization. In a way, the show was bound to come up short. According to Rutberg, Peter Selz judged it harshly: “It’s a terrible show.” In response to which Jack said, “It’s time for you to write your book. After all, you’ve been writing it all your life.”57 Both Peter and Susan Landauer have different versions of how the book came about, Susan citing an exhibition that they intended to co-curate at the San Jose Museum of Art. When the exhibition was canceled, the museum withdrew as co-publisher. But all three agree that Peter’s essay in Reading California, a companion to Made in California, the catalogue for the LACMA exhibition, did indeed provide the impetus for his award-winning study of political art in California.58
Whether or not a museum conversation was the literal beginning of Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, the story underlines the importance to both men of the social and political dimension of art. Another artist they have discussed in these terms is the painter Jerome Witkin (brother of photographer Joel Peter Witkin). Whereas Hans Burkhardt is the observer of human inhumanity, of holocaust in general, Jerome Witkin focuses on the Nazi Holocaust specifically, in paintings of such brutality that they are almost unbearable to examine. A March 2007 article by Selz in Art in America introduces Witkin as one of the greatest examples of figuration in the service of social conscience in recent art. This is exactly the territory where Peter Selz thrives.
Examining the range of Selz’s “retirement” projects, we are reminded that his interests and loyalties remain attached to his own roots—in Germany but, more important, with German Expressionism as well as Neue Sachlichkeit painting. Over the years, Peter has returned periodically to his old interests, many of them attached to his early work on German art. In 1969 at Berkeley he presented a Richard Lindner retrospective, the first in the United States, which traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Peter’s 1973 Ferdinand Hodler exhibition at Berkeley was the first in this country, and it traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard. Peter loves to draw the connections he sees between artists like Hodler and German American Lyonel Feininger. And then in 1978 he presented German and Austrian Expressionism: Art in a Turbulent Era, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and then shown in Minneapolis.
Peter’s 2002 appointment to the board of Neue Galerie in New York is one reminder of the pioneering role he has played in connection with German and Austrian art. He is one of the few American scholars whose name almost automatically appears on such a list. Yet the memory of his contributions seems to be dimming as younger curators wrestle to establish primary positions in the highly competitive art history and museum fields. In that competition, the key contributions of their predecessors occasionally—and perhaps inadvertently—go unacknowledged.
Such a problem arose with the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2006–7 show Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s.59 The exhibition was an eye opener and a public success for the museum, the relatively esoteric subject matter notwithstanding. However—and here is the problem—in 1980 a thematically quite similar exhibition, German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic, opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and then traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Peter was chairman of the exhibition committee of four.60 For both catalogues, the cover illustration is the same Christian Schad painting, Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), though the Met’s catalogue uses a detail of the transvestite standing to the right in the full composition. Nowhere in the grander 2006 publication is mention made of the 1980 show or catalogue, or of its curators. Peter, who in the first publication wrote a chapter titled “Artist as Social Critic,” was unhappy that the Metropolitan Museum of Art failed to acknowledge such an important predecessor and encouraged an investigation of the oversight. My polite inquiry initiated a civil, even pleasant, phone and e-mail exchange with the curator and editor of the book, with assurances that in the next printing Selz would be acknowledged.61 He looks forward to the fourth printing, should it ever occur. For now, it is unfortunate that the art historian who introduced the subject to America—as Selz would like to be seen— has no presence in this recent venture.
Here is how critic Robert Hughes opened his review of the exhibition that Peter and his colleagues put together in 1980: “The show . . . deals with an aspect of modernism that 15 years ago was thought hardly worth discussing. What could be further from the concerns of Matisse and Braque than the images to which German intellectuals gave the name Neue Sachlichkeit—‘new objectivity’? There, in contrast to the French tradition of measure, delectation and ordered feeling—of art ‘above’ politics—was a cold, laconic, even squalid-looking art that wanted to contribute its voice to the tormented political theater of the Weimar Republic.”62
Peter Selz really is returning full circle to his German roots and the art and artists with whom he began his long journey. Scholarship does indeed move forward, providing more information along with new insights and understandings based on serious research. The reward, even the inherent pleasure, in scholarly writing and other means of communicating new ideas turns out to be providing this foundation on which others may incrementally build. Selz is understandably disappointed by the lapse associated with Glitter and Doom. But what we really learn from Peter’s momentary annoyance is that for him, his publications and exhibitions are his identity. Like most of us, he wants to be liked, but he also wants to be admired.
So, for Peter, Glitter and Doom represents a small rip in the fabric of an unusually independent and largely successful career—the same career that was honored just a few years ago by Selz’s College Art Association colleagues on that February day in New York. One would hope that Art of Engagement (winner of CAA’s award for best art book of 2006)—along with German Expressionist Painting, New Images of Man, Art in Our Times, Art in a Turbulent Era, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Max Beckmann (also Beckmann: The Self-Portraits), Sam Francis, Chillida, Nathan Oliveira, and Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (with a major nod to collaborator Kristine Stiles)—would compensate for this single slight. Peter proudly points out that his writing has been translated into fourteen languages, including Basque and, most recently, Finnish.
• • •
This study of a life has relied heavily on the subject’s own oral history accounts—his memories—filled in and elaborated, and sometimes contradicted, by the observations of over forty individuals whose lives intersected Peter’s in meaningful and revealing ways over nine decades. Although this is a limited sample, most of the important events, accomplishments, and people in Peter’s life do appear. It is not the case that in this series of “sketches” no stone was left unturned, but that is probably just as well. We have been guided in this biographical quest by important constants that go back to Munich: Peter’s love of art; his problematic relationships, especially with women; and the political life that must grow out of his early involvement in the Werkleute. These themes do not entirely explain his life, but they do carry heavy importance and provide useful touchstones.
Peter’s reputation lies in the early prominence he achieved as a voice for and about modernist art in Europe and America. In that respect, his assimilation into life in the United States was thorough and complete. His innovative publications and provocative exhibitions have secured his position as an important presence and voice in his chosen field. This achievement is in part the result, as he is the first to point out, of being in the right place at the right time. In the 1960s, first in New York and then at Berkeley, he became as close to a celebrity as ordinary (which Peter is not) art historians could be. Peter certainly relished the attention and took full advantage of the benefits, social and professional, that that status conferred. In 2008, Peter was honored by a mayoral proclamation from Berkeley’s mayor Tom Bates declaring March 25 Peter Selz Day. He was surrounded by his family and friends as he accepted the recognition for his contributions to his adopted city. And it seemed entirely appropriate that, there in city council chamber, he stood facing the 1973 Romare Bearden mural whose commission he had advocated as a civic arts commissioner more than thirty years earlier. Peter cannot complain about being a prophet without honor in his hometown. Nor was this the first such honor he received. Perhaps the most meaningful was the Order of Merit, First Class, awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany on 18 September 1963 for his “interest in twentieth-century German art.” The award document was signed in Bonn by Dr. Heinrich Lübke, president of the Federal Republic, and presented at a ceremony in New York.
Ariel Parkinson was among the close friends and family who attended the ceremony at Berkeley’s city hall. Ariel lives in the Berkeley hills a few blocks from Peter and Carole.63 She is almost Peter’s age, and the two of them have made a practice of walking through their residential neighborhood several times a week. They are obviously very fond of each other. Ariel is an artist with an interest in scenic design and theater, and as such her art would not seem to appeal to Peter’s tastes. Nonetheless, because he likes her, he came to like her art. In 2009–10, in a show he co-curated in a commercial gallery on Bancroft Avenue, directly across from the UC Berkeley campus, he featured, among other works, several of Ariel’s life-size stuffed-cloth nude male figures. The exhibition as a whole revisited his 1959 New Images of Man show at MoMA. Bearing the same title but with the addition of “and Woman,” it aspired to update that controversial and influential exhibition.64 Among the women included in the exhibition, Ariel stands out for her independent and eccentric vision—definitely producing new images of man—by a woman.
On their walks, Ariel and Peter forged a friendship with, in her words, “a tonic element of disagreement.” Ariel, who admires Peter, nonetheless does not allow herself to be submerged by his authority:
My friendship with Peter had three levels. As an aspiring painter and designer, I was inevitably impressed by his position and power in the art world. I had used, and continue to use, many of his books and articles as source material. I appreciate his scholarship and command of the field, knowing everybody by name, their life histories, what their work looks like and means. But we find grounds for difference on almost everything. I not only differ—I can be to some extent an untutored beast, [challenging him] on such eminences as Carl André and Christo, de Kooning and Guston, David Smith and Serra—along with Flemish portraits, Renaissance drawings, and equestrian bronzes.
Ariel said she thinks Peter tends to “acknowledge, perhaps too generously, the currents of style,” but that though they find grounds for difference, they “share certain basic aesthetic tastes.” Ariel sticks to her guns, as became evident in our discussion of New Images of Man, the exhibition of Selz’s that she most respects: “He took two very young—they were in school, mind you—artists from this area, Stephen De Staebler and Nathan Oliveira. These two, then totally unknown, are among the few great artists the United States has produced. I would say Leonard Baskin [another Selz favorite] was one, De Staebler was two, and Oliveira was three.” When asked who was number four or five, she paused. I suggested Richard Diebenkorn, whom Selz admires. “No, definitely not Diebenkorn.” She explained: “A group of experts programmed a computer for elements of style to see if they could make a painting by so and so. And the only artist they had any success with was Diebenkorn. He had a formula.”65
But Ariel’s affection for Peter trumps her reservations even about his support for artists she found unworthy. Her description of her friend is a tribute, and a somewhat romantic one at that: “Peter has remained a real human being. He loves and appreciates food and drink. He likes dogs and cows. And . . . it’s very nice to have Peter as a friend, a real friend that you love. But it’s more an affection, for I think of him as a little boy sometimes. I can see a little boy, with bright eyes, very wide apart under dark eyebrows, loving things himself, responding to the old master paintings in his grandfather’s gallery. To the green meadows that they went walking in on Sundays. And girls—endless girls. One girl after another.”66
Peter thrives on attention. And his persistently youthful enthusiasm is what attracts many people, especially students. For many, too, this patented Selz “passion” excuses perceived shortcomings and character flaws. His daughter Gabrielle is only one of many who point to the “creative life force” that has provided the fuel for him to pursue the art life into his early nineties.67 He is widely admired as a phenomenon of durability, and this quality is what artists point to as separating Peter from the pack of other art historians.
Painters Kevan Jenson and Ursula O’Farrell are among the up-and-coming artists of whom Peter is so fond. Jenson recently moved from Los Angeles to Berkeley, partly owing to his contact with Peter, who organized and wrote the catalogue essay for his recent one-man show at San Francisco’s Meridian Gallery. A close personal connection has developed between the two, very much as between Peter and Tobi Kahn in New York. Jenson is effusive in his appreciation of his friend: “Peter Selz has gone out of his way to help me and others with our careers, but his reminder that you, the artist, are connected to the long tradition of art making provides the deepest inspiration. I once overheard him say that ‘painting has been around since Lascaux, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere.’ I knew then I couldn’t stop painting.”68
O’Farrell, whom Peter included in the recent show at the Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley, has this to say: “After graduating from college, I was granted a foreign study scholarship to travel to Germany and Austria to explore my personal fascination with Expressionism. . . . I was quite fortunate to run across several paperback books [in English] in a few German stores—all written by Dr. Peter Selz. His writings guided me and helped me to better appreciate the art I was enthralled with . . . to understand the nature and context of these forceful paintings.”69
Book editor Lorna Price (now Dittmer) came into Peter’s life and career during his time at Pomona College, where as an undergraduate she showed his lecture slides. Then—remarkably, in her view—he hired her to do the preliminary editing of German Expressionist Painting, which was being prepared for the University of California Press. Lorna followed Peter as one of his main editors for years, including several based at UC Press. Along with Kristine Stiles, Lorna may be the most intimately involved with Peter’s publications.
Peter has always been able to invest confidence in the people he’s worked with, whether aspiring young art historians ready to embark on their own careers, or whether someone like me, not an art historian or even an art history major. I’m forever grateful that he placed confidence in the (then rather lightly tried) skills that I could deploy as reader/editor— skills that could serve us both over the years. That confidence did serve to show me the way to a new career track—one which has brought me enormous satisfaction over the course of five decades.70
Late in life, Peter Selz remains surrounded by a veritable congregation of friends, family members, and colorful admirers. There may be fewer such folk among his colleagues, but those who do maintain contact with him tend to be generally indulgent and affectionate. They appreciate his best qualities and are amused—perhaps even charmed—by his foibles. The following words, written by his step-granddaughter, Kyra Baldwin, seventeen years old and preparing to enter university, put it all into satisfactory perspective:
So anyway, I had a great talk with Peter! He asked me why I wanted to go to each school and what I do with my time, and then he just asked me to keep talking. I told him what I had done that day—cut up a Northeastern University sticker and put it back together to spell “another tiny universe” on a windowpane. His eyes lit up. . . . Peter is a supportive, lively grandparent. When we walk into the Berkeley Art Museum or SFMOMA, he knows the people working at the desk. Other museum visitors come up to him and chat. It’s a fun experience, spending time with such a well-known man in his element. Peter insists on taking me to see the SFMOMA permanent collection every couple of years; at this point, it is familiar enough to work as a context for other art I see.71
It turns out that there is a certain sustained—and sustaining—pattern to Peter’s life in art. Despite personal and professional difficulties along the way, he remains committed to an aesthetic and intellectual ideal that has guided him throughout his life. The passion and enthusiasm—it would not be overstating the case to call it wonder—implanted by his grandfather Drey’s expert introduction to the world of great art have only grown over the years. And Kyra’s visits to SFMOMA, like Gabrielle’s regular trips with her father to the Met, bring the art experience full circle. For Peter Selz, those Sunday afternoon visits to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek to study the old masters amounted to a life-defining legacy, the pleasure and inspiration of which he has passed on to subsequent generations.