Peter Selz (20 page)

The curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, sympathetic to what was going on in New York and particularly receptive to Pop Art, put his finger directly on the fundamental shift in power and influence in the art world. The lead in the art dance, he noted, moved rapidly back and forth between critic/historian and artist, with the museums and galleries watching and waiting to pick winners and then moving in:

 

We are still working with myths developed in the age of alienation . . . [but] there no longer is any shock in art. About a year and a half ago [1961] I saw the work of Wesselmann, Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein in their studios. They were working independently, unaware of each other, but with a common source of imagery. Within that year and a half they have had shows, been dubbed a movement, and we are discussing them at a symposium. This is instant art history, art history made so aware of itself that it leaps to get ahead of art.
⁹

The conservative critic Hilton Kramer, though hardly in the same camp as Geldzahler, echoed this point with the observation that “the relation of the critic to his material has been significantly reversed. Critics are now free to confront a class of objects . . . about which almost anything [they] say will engage the mind more fully and affect the emotions more subtly than the objects whose meaning they are ostensibly elucidating.”
¹⁰

Geldzahler
and Kramer were speakers (along with Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz) at the Museum of Modern Art symposium on Pop Art organized and moderated by Peter Selz. (In the audience was Marcel Duchamp, who reportedly commented that Kramer was “insufficiently light-hearted.”)
¹¹
The symposium was held on 13 December 1962, six weeks after Sidney Janis opened his
New Realists
exhibition, a survey of contemporary Pop Art. According to Thomas Hess in his
Art News
review, “The point of the Janis show . . . was an implicit proclamation that the New had arrived and it was time for all the old fogies to pack.”
¹²
Selz was no fan of Pop Art, and few of the other panelists, with the exception of Geldzahler, were favorably disposed toward the new movement. But the art fashion tide picked up Pop and swept aside the unbelievers, the “old fogies” who'd been brought up in what might as well have been a different era.

Selz had been particularly vocal in his criticism. Writing in
Partisan Review
, he dismissed the new movement by accusing it of being “as easy to consume as it is to produce and, better yet, easy to market because it is loud, it is clean, and you can be fashionable and at the same time know what you are looking at.”
¹³
According to Selz, Pop Art was a product of American consumerism and drew its subjects directly from that source in a kind of circular process. He missed the evidence of engagement and suffering that informed the great modern art of the recent past, such as German Expressionism. For him, the new art operated exclusively on the surface; it was both literally and figuratively devoid of depth.

The issue of surface versus depth was of great significance to Selz. He claimed to be open to the new, regardless of style, but if subjectivity and human qualities were removed, he had little use for what was left. A 2009 article by Richard Dorment in the
New York Review of Books
tackles that issue head on in a discussion of three recent books about Andy Warhol.
¹⁴
The essay discusses what constitutes an original work of art by asking to what extent the artist's hand need be evident or even required in its production. Warhol's fame, of course, is indebted to the Duchampian tenet that art exists not in the execution, but in the idea. How the object is manufactured or even if it is mass-produced (appropriate terms in connection with Warhol) is beside the point.

This
subversive view of authorship and handcrafted originality remains highly offensive to traditionalists. At best, they would hold, it smacks more of philosophy than of art. In fact, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto seems to agree when he describes Warhol as “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.”
¹⁵
According to one of the assistants responsible for painting many of Warhol's later works, the artist's primary role was signing them when they were sold. A painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether or not he ever touched it.
¹⁶

This practice alone could be taken as a fundamentally cynical view of fine art, and many observers at the time did so. But that was not what Selz objected to most. Rather, it was the attitude that art had no life, no passion—no humanity—breathing beneath the surface, eagerly waiting to emerge and affect the viewer. As Warhol famously said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.”
¹⁷
Influential though this erasure of the artist became in aspects of postmodern thinking, this notion was antithetical to Selz's humanistic approach to art. And it pretty much precluded any true détente between Selz and one rising current of contemporary art and cultural criticism.

In our 1982 interview, Peter had very little good to say about the situation in New York prior to his departure for California. Above all, he deplored the cozy commercial relationships between artists, curators, galleries, and, finally, museums. There was a new way of creating reputations that fueled the art market, serving the immediate interests of every part of the art scene—except the art itself. Everyone was involved in a kind of new art “world order” in this New Art City.

 

What is happening is, a new kind of merchandise is being offered. I think the whole thing started with Pop Art and its sales pitch. Now, there are things in Pop that I find fascinating. I think Oldenburg is a great artist, as is George Segal. There are things in Realism, especially somebody like Chuck Close, which I also admire. But by and large, what you had in the beginning of Pop was a gallery-oriented art. It became very obvious what Lichtenstein was doing—he was enlarging a comic strip into gallery scale; and Rosenquist, diminishing the billboards he had been doing to gallery scale. So you suddenly had a gallery kind
of art which could be sold and has been sold at very, very high prices. Then museums, of course, take part in all this—they can't neglect it. But I feel that to a great extent it's done by dealers . . . which is one reason why I was perfectly happy to leave New York when all this happened.
¹⁸

As Peter talked about the new and powerful role of the art market in New York at this time, he shifted his attention to the commercial aspects of rediscovering the art of the past. He recalled San Francisco writer and critic Alfred Frankenstein's asserting “more than once” that before historic American art was valued by the market, it received little attention in art history departments in this country's colleges and universities. Then, as interest caught on and prices went up,
voilà:
American art was being taught about on American campuses. Selz pointed to two illustrations of contrary developments deriving from this market-driven “discovery” phenomenon. One was the great increase in value of Thomas Eakins photographs as the artist began to be recognized—justifiably, in Selz's view—not merely as a great American realist painter but as a “major figure of the nineteenth century.”
¹⁹
In contrast, he disapproved of the parallel situation in which the works of minor American Impressionists (Impressionism was never very good in America, in his view) suddenly became extremely high priced.

Turning to realism and the figure, Selz compared his
New Images of Man
, involving art that deals with personal feeling, to
The New Realism
, which at the time of the interview (1982) was on view at the Oakland Museum and which he considered for the most part “appalling.”
²⁰
He explained why he felt that way in a statement that eloquently reiterates his fundamental position on the subject of realism. To erroneously group artists together under that convenient rubric, he insists, entirely misses individual differences, including artistic goals, thereby obscuring the very meaning of the work:

 

To my mind, the most important painting in America in the past decade is the last work of Philip Guston. But I wouldn't call that realist. This is the kind of humanist figuration, human image feeling . . . that relates to our world, our life. Guston was the only one of the Abstract Expressionist generation who reached a great style in his old age, who painted pictures which are absolutely astonishing. Or the kind
of figuration that [R. B.] Kitaj and Jim Dine have done, very different from Guston but also extraordinary. The other kind, most of the Photo-Realism, is tour-de-force painting—it shows what a painter can do by using photographs. But once you get over the fact—“my god, isn't it remarkable how he managed to do this”—it isn't all that exciting.
²¹

What Selz wants in art is subjectivity and metaphor. He never was interested in simple realistic rendition, whether academic nudes by William Adolphe Bouguereau or soup cans by Warhol. He acknowledges that dealing with photography has a point, but not enough of a point to engage his interest. As he warms to his subject, Peter's efforts to convey his personal critical/historical perspective, referring to certain favorite artists, become both more urgent and more eloquent. The eagerness to convince an audience reveals the passion he brings to his work:

 

Kitaj comes out of a collage tradition which deals with film and what Germans like [George] Grosz and [John] Heartfield were doing, with what the English were doing at the beginning of English Pop—but he's bringing it into the context of American consciousness. He deals with a complexity of issues: reality, history, poetry, and the whole history of art (of which he's totally aware). . . . And when I look at these complex paintings and try to figure them out, at the same time they have an extraordinary impact because of their intensity. Yes, that's the important word: intensity. That's what I find missing in paintings of cows and motorcycles, as much as I miss it in the kind of color field painting that [Clement] Greenberg was sponsoring.

These are just formal exercises, and it really doesn't matter to me if these exercises are abstract or realistic—they're simply not interesting. They don't have the kind of personal intensity, the personal engagement, the metaphor, the feeling, and the knowledge of art that should be in them—what I see in late Guston, and also in his early abstractions of the fifties and early sixties—the same knowledge of art, of himself, and deep [social/political] engagement. An emotional feeling, a sense of order, and an incredible sense of composition and color. It's when the subjective vision is absent, the commitment—like in the new realism and some of the color-field painting—that I lose interest. But certainly I don't have any stylistic preferences.
²²

Selz's ideas about significance in art unfold consistently, representing a carefully chosen vantage point. It is far less the particular style than the
vision that he seeks and most admires when he finds it. In this he always returns to the work of his New York friend Mark Rothko. And the basis for this loyalty is that Rothko, more than any other artist, satisfies Selz's desire to reconcile the nonobjective and the figurative poles. Selz also embraces the minimalism of John McLaughlin and Josef Albers's Hard Edge abstractions, but that requires, given the human “presence” as the final measure, going beyond formalist criticism: “It is a sense of order. Art is broad enough that it should incorporate a person's vision, whether an obvious sense of order or random. And it's this [visionary] sense of order that I see in, for example, John McLaughlin—who had an extraordinary sensitivity to form. When I see that, I admire the work. Now, I admire it most when it comes together as in Mark Rothko. That I admire more than anything.”
²³

By the mid-1960s, even Rothko and de Kooning were being viewed in some quarters as a “dead end,” at least for younger artists and critics. So Peter Selz's exhibition record was subject to criticism from an impatient and changing art world that wanted to move forward. His willingness to adopt a contrary position in the face of prevalent art world fashion, most memorably 1960s Pop Art, appears to have also played a role in growing pressure for him to leave MoMA. The following account may be apocryphal, but it expresses the mood of the time and the rapid changes that were under way in the art world: One day in the early 1960s, Peter was rushing to a meeting somewhere in MoMA. Passing through the galleries he encountered Frank Stella, perhaps the leading figure among the “young Turks” of contemporary American art. Peter had forgotten his watch, so he stopped, greeted Frank, and asked him for the time. Frank paused and then responded, “It's time for you to leave.”

In
New Art City
, Jed Perl draws a picture of the Manhattan art world that is simultaneously positive and negative—vital, youthful, exciting, superactive, but increasingly cynical and commercialized. For nouveau riche collectors, art was an extension of personal wealth, a means to demonstrate power and social standing. Although the Museum of Modern Art still served as the institutional identity of modern and, to some extent, contemporary art,
²⁴
it was already coming to represent what a younger generation of artists was beginning to reject. There was a growing sense among them that the museum was becoming outdated, certainly in terms
of their ideas, interests, and objectives. The popular Chuck Berry 1956 rock-and-roll youth-culture anthem, “Roll over Beethoven,” could just as well have been the theme song of the day in all creative fields.
²⁵
Others of Peter's generation—including Greenberg and his favored artists, all supported by MoMA—were also subjected to the same suspicion and, finally, rejection that Selz was beginning to sense personally.