Peter Selz (21 page)

In fact, the situation at the Museum of Modern Art was deteriorating for Peter. What started out as a dream job had become less so. Interviews conducted by Sharon Zane with MoMA staff in a 1991 oral history project, along with internal museum memos, suggest several factors leading to Selz's growing discomfort in his position at MoMA. Taken in no particular order they include curatorial infighting and rivalry (the oft-repeated but unsubstantiated rumor that Bill Seitz wanted Peter's job); the extreme unlikelihood that Peter would ever realize his ambition of the top job as director; and possible dissatisfaction with him personally, or his performance, on the part of the administration. And one cannot discount the “Jewish issue” as an obstacle to Peter's hopes for advancement. A fuller quote from the previously cited
Art News
editorial by Thomas B. Hess describes the Jewish “glass ceiling” in many museums, not excluding the supposedly progressive MoMA:

 

Because most museums were founded by Old Money—the town's country club set, established bankers, merchants, landlords—their boards of trustees retain a distinctive coloration chiefly marked by a suspicion of—let's say snobbishness to—the New Rich. Which suggests a reason for one of the more curious anomalies in the museum world: its anti-semitism—the most widely known, unspoken fact in the field. Key positions in the best art-history departments . . . are open to Jews, but when the trustees for Eastern and Midwest museums go shopping for a director, it goes without saying that no Jew need apply (unless, naturally, he has successfully changed his name and his religion).
²⁶

These difficulties, his co-workers generally agreed, combined to create a pressure to move on that Peter could not ignore.

As much as Peter admired René d'Harnoncourt, a few of the MoMA interviewees speculated that Peter was rubbing him, and possibly Alfred Barr, the wrong way. In his 1973 history of the museum,
Good
Old Modern
, Russell Lynes writes only that “Selz stayed for seven years, and was encouraged—indeed, urged—by d'Harnoncourt to accept a job at Berkeley.”
²⁷
Peter no doubt had detractors among his colleagues, most notably Porter McCray, who resented him and wanted to minimize his influence. It is difficult to draw conclusions about the actual situation, and Peter himself continues to paint a generally positive picture of his collegial relationships. Reading his 1994 MoMA interview, one would think that even if everything was not all roses, at least the working environment was civil and generally supportive. And that may have been the case on a superficial level. With the possible exception of Bill Seitz, however, Peter admits ruefully that he had no close friends among his colleagues at MoMA. Once in a staff meeting he looked around and tried to locate a single person who had invited him to his or her house, even just for cocktails if not dinner. He came up empty, a disappointment that evidently bothers him to this day.
²⁸

Peter does bemoan the lack of real friendships at MoMA, but he tends still to think of his colleagues as “liking” him. That was presumably true in some cases, but a few colleagues, speaking for the record, were not always flattering. Collector and MoMA trustee Walter Bareiss, when asked by oral historian Sharon Zane about the departure of several key curators (among them Selz and Seitz), described a kind of administrative housecleaning:

 

Even though I liked him personally, Seitz was not a very efficient person. I don't think he could really hold the job the way he should. . . . Selz was a little too
abrasive
[italics in transcript]. I think he left because Barr wouldn't stand for that—Dorothy Miller wouldn't stand for it either. He was ambitious, a person who would take over. . . . But that in itself, why not? I don't have any objection to people who try, and then they go and make their future at some other institution. It is nothing negative for their character. But there are some institutions [presumably MoMA was one] who [
sic
] cannot afford to have kings and princes.
²⁹

Helen M. Franc, editorial associate and special assistant to d'Harnoncourt, who apparently got out before the situation further deteriorated, offers her own characterization of the environment during Selz's tenure at the museum:

 

It
was a time of considerable internecine rivalry. I guess it was aggravated by the fact that after Alfred [Barr] was shunted from his position as director, the Museum was run by committee, which never does any institution any good. . . . It was a very disruptive time. Everybody hated everybody else in the Museum and there were alignments of who was against whom. Also, when I got to work with Porter [McCray], well, with René particularly, I realized there was a rather naive view of the staff towards what the function of a director was. So they thought he wasn't paying enough attention to their little needs. . . .
³⁰

Bill [Seitz] was more charismatic [than Selz] . . . but very self-centered. And when he was working on an exhibition he would bug out from all the responsibilities of the department and stay home, theoretically writing a catalogue. . . . Peter, who was less liked, was really a much better administrator; he carried on things. Bill was always trying to put the skids on Peter.
³¹

Generally speaking, the MoMA interviews give the impression that virtually
everyone
was unhappy and that many harbored grudges, especially against those above or in direct competition with them. Of course, this condition is true of many organized working environments, and apparently MoMA was no exception. Even Peter's assistant, associate curator Alicia Legg, for whose work he had kind and appreciative words, described her boss's departure in less than favorable terms: “Selz was sort of dismissed . . . was essentially asked to leave. Something about vouchers for trips he'd taken.” And surprisingly, in light of what Peter remembers as a positive working relationship, when Legg was asked if there weren't some other dissatisfaction, her answer was “Yes. He just wasn't up to the job.”
³²
Elsewhere in the interview, however, in speaking of her boss she sounds almost affectionate. And another co-worker, publications manager Frances Pernas, remembers Peter as a pleasure to work with: “He was a nice man. He had a warmth about him.”
³³

Whatever the truth of these after-the-fact and sometimes almost hostile oral profiles, the overall picture is fairly dismal. As for Legg's assertion that travel voucher irregularities, submitting claims for “more than he deserved,” were cause for his dismissal (as his colleagues believed he was), Peter acknowledges there was indeed a problem, documented by memos in the MoMA archives, but it was a small matter of $63.25
and occurred four years before he left the museum.
³⁴
Although it seems unlikely that this single early infraction would have been left simmering for so long, it may well have become part of a plan for later administrative action. But this was not the only, or even the most telling, aspect of a deteriorating situation that contributed to Selz's decision to abandon New York for a fresh start both professionally and personally.

•    •    •

One mark of a full life is achieving some meaningful degree of balance between the professional arena and the private realm built around friends and, above all, family. These areas, though overlapping, remain separate experiential entities, and often work in competition with each other. While Peter's successes at MoMA were compounded by the string of exhibitions for which he is still known, everything seemed to be on track. The family lived well, in a large apartment at 333 Central Park West (see
Fig. 13
). But something was lacking in the area of close personal relationships. Peter and Thalia socialized with couples well known in art and literary circles, among them Lionel and Diana Trilling. But whereas Thalia was willing to enjoy these friendships at face value, Peter felt a distance.

Despite their active social life—museum events, art receptions, dinners—Peter feels to this day that they had few “real” friends in New York.
³⁵
The exceptions were Bill Seitz and Dore Ashton. These two were his best friends in New York, and Ashton has remained in Peter's close circle. As for Seitz, there is much to learn from their working relationship at MoMA and what Peter understood to be a close friendship.
³⁶
Their association began well. Much later Thalia, speaking to Peter, recalled: “You really ranked [thought highly of] them, you wanted to get a duplicate of that closeness—a substitute for family.” Peter did not disagree: “That's right. And you felt close to them too. You remember the time we were out at Princeton and Bill was taking mescaline? That brought me closer to him.”
³⁷
The incident he refers to, a visit with Bill and Irma Seitz at their Princeton home, reveals a very sixties aspect of their social interaction. The mescaline, he explains, was an “informal experiment.”
On this occasion, he and the two women observed Bill with considerable curiosity as he experienced a mescaline high. A week or two later, Peter was scheduled to conduct the same “experiment” in the same company. But the second event never took place.

It was not just his social life that failed to satisfy Selz. His domestic life had also frayed into disorder. There are ample clues as to where things went wrong between husband and wife. Sadly, Thalia's ability to recall the past was stolen from her by Alzheimer's disease. She lived out her last years in a Long Island care facility and died in early 2010. During that time she was visited regularly by younger daughter Gabrielle. Gaby, as friends and family call her, lives in Southampton not far from the Hampton Care Center, where her once strikingly beautiful mother, an accomplished writer of short stories who by her former husband's admission helped him significantly with his own writing, spent her final days. Nonetheless, Thalia contributes to this biography through the gift of analog recording technology and taped conversations. Ten cassettes recorded in 1993 and 1994, provided by Gabrielle, give her a compelling presence as an intelligent and knowledgeable individual, though one held captive by anger and bitterness.

Although the Peter and Thalia story, their seventeen years together, began as an intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling relationship,
³⁸
he had one serious weakness: an inability to limit himself to one partner. This probably was the deal breaker for Thalia, who, as Peter's Pomona faculty colleague and good friend Charles Leslie put it, was “almost insanely jealous.” In the end, Peter's infidelity was, as later wives discovered, one of the unspoken and nonnegotiable terms of being married to him.

The taped conversations were initiated by Thalia, ostensibly to gather material for a memoir of their art world life together. Peter readily agreed to her proposal (though they had divorced almost thirty years earlier, they had stayed connected), and they met several times to do the tapes in New York and Berkeley in the early 1990s. The fundamental differences in their approaches to forming the memoir are evident from the beginning. Thalia's interest was in their troubled personal life; focusing on their marriage and family, she sought answers. For Peter, in contrast, professional life trumped the personal. The reasons for their failure in
the domestic sphere, a central concern for Thalia, were for Peter less worthy of discussion than was his career and success in the art world, specifically during his seven years at the Museum of Modern Art.

The one point on which they were in agreement was that in the early days—in Chicago, Paris, and even Pomona—they were very much in love. As a young couple building a life together, they, as Thalia puts it, “worked as a unit.” Throughout this long mutual interview, Thalia's tone is determined and, at times, combative. She is on a mission to understand what went wrong, and to force Peter not only to recognize but to acknowledge the hard and destructive realities of their relationship, especially as it fell apart in New York. Peter, for his part, is conciliatory but apparently oblivious to the downward spiral their family life was taking. In fact, he seems genuinely mystified by Thalia's harsh critique of their last years together and puzzled by her negative memories. He either ignores, or is unwilling to discuss, the underlying problems and their causes, despite the collateral damage to their young daughters. What on the surface might seem an admirable trait—insistence on the good parts of a shared history—here resembles more a pattern of willful denial in service to a carefully cultivated self-conception.

What happened to the love, brimming with optimism for the future, that these attractive and interesting young quasi-bohemians shared? Some answers emerge almost immediately as Thalia tries to establish the direction of the planned memoir:

 

I see the focus on our life together in New York. . . . I also see a very personal impact that the New York art world had on me. The immense excitement it offered and the degree to which it probably permanently warped some of my better values. I'd like to explore the depth of my hostility. . . . I remember those years as the
seven lean years
, when you were at the Museum of Modern Art. I don't blame the museum for everything that happened to me, or to
you
. I think it was an extremely important formative period in your life and career. I do think it had a destructive impact upon me—and on our marriage, although we can't blame our breakup on MoMA. I think it made childrearing immensely difficult, virtually impossible.

Peter's response is surprisingly neutral, as if he were listening to someone else's story, agreeing that these difficulties would “add a great deal
of interest to the book.” Thalia perceptively observes: “I am, I think, like Peter, very concerned with history—but I'm more concerned with personal history, and he with a history both personal and public.”