Peter Selz (27 page)

One faculty member, however, calls into question Selz's blanket indictment of his art history colleagues' lack of interest in the museum. James Cahill came to Berkeley from the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution at about the same time Peter arrived. He brought with him an extensive knowledge of Chinese art, for which he was renowned in academic circles, along with a personal collection, from which key works entered the museum collection. Cahill established a support group of patrons to collect major works of Asian art, notably Chinese paintings from the Sung, Yüan, Ming, and Chi'ing dynasties.
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He also initiated a series of pioneering exhibitions that grew out of his graduate seminars.

Cahill's memory of the relationship between Selz and the art history department, one that he describes as “strange and ambiguous,” is based on firsthand observation:

 

In principle he was supposed to be teaching a museum-practice course, but I don't think he ever did, or if so only a time or two. We could never work out just what form it should take, how it should relate to Bay Area museums, etc. Herschel Chipp was our modernist, but he was more traditionally art historical, working on earlier 20th-century, not contemporary—which
for most faculty was a highly suspect area for art history (better journalism). Peter was [required] to come to faculty meetings, but he seldom did [Selz denies this]. And relations between him and most of the faculty were indeed very cool—most of them barely approved his museum appointment, certainly didn't want him as an active department member.

Cahill continues his account with a description of the few attempts at collaboration between the department and museum: “For a long time, no faculty cooperated with him on an exhibition; the first, I think, was Dick Amyx in an exhibition of Greek vase painting, one of several Kress Foundation–sponsored seminar-exhibition projects [Selz points out that he got the Kress grants specifically for such collaborations]. I did another, and I think Joanna Williams did one on Indian art [Selz says not]. At exhibition openings . . . few faculty members showed up. Or such is my memory.”
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It is surprising that there was not greater support for Selz's efforts to create a museum that served not just the art students but the broader university population, the Berkeley community, and even a national audience. Presumably everyone involved at Berkeley would recognize that as a worthy goal for the new museum. It appears that Selz was aware of the challenge to fully engage faculty, as evidenced by his designating department colleagues as subject-specialty curators. In fact, this covered the entire art history faculty at Berkeley.
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How much input they had remains a subject of disagreement. But at least Selz seems to have made the effort. Apparently, it wasn't enough; as he recalled in 1982, “We didn't quite see eye to eye. I didn't have much support. . . . We had the standard kind of internal turmoil, because we all felt what we were doing was so important. . . . I was reaching my late fifties, and there were other things I wanted to do. I wanted to do more writing. I was eager to get to this book I finished just two years ago,
Art in Our Times
—a book . . . [that] I wanted to do more than anything, and I knew I couldn't do it running the museum.”
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It was not just his interest in writing that led his to his resignation as director. He was also drawn by the classroom and the students, both undergraduate and graduate, whose company he so enjoyed. In fact,
Professor Selz appears to have been famous with his students for his accessibility and openness to social contact outside the classroom. It may be that giving up what had become a frustrating administrative position in a fractious workplace for a full-time academic career was yet another opportunity for escape:

 

Eventually I said, “Well, okay, it's about time to get somebody else to run the museum,” hoping that my resignation . . . would prompt the administration to find more money. . . . Instead they found less. In fact, they found somebody who went along with all the budget cuts, and finally almost buried the place. . . . They turned it over to [Jerry Ballaine]—a painter friend of the dean—who . . . didn't run it very well at all. So Brenda Richardson, [by then] the chief curator, ran the thing. . . . Then after Ballaine left, the museum had no head at all for almost a year [there were several acting directors from among the art faculty]. They offered the job to a number of good people who turned it down when they saw the financial situation.
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Selz's years as UAM founding director involved increasingly difficult relations with the administration and with at least a few of the board of regents, notably art collector Norton Simon. Simon had encouraged a number of museums—Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, Berkeley, and even the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor—to hope they might receive his stellar old-master collection. But he eventually set up at the Pasadena Museum of Art in a controversial takeover of the building that included the Galka Scheyer Blue Four collection. His record as UC regent was both good and bad, but it appears that he was not helpful to Selz on behalf of the museum.
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The two men also diverged in terms of politics and social values. An event that took place at the time of the violent confrontation at People's Park in 1969 provides a perfect example:

 

The National Guard was all over Berkeley. . . . There were planes overhead spraying the demonstrators. . . . [James Rector, reportedly a student bystander, had been killed in the first confrontation, on May 15.] One solution to the standoff would have been for the city to take over the park, and the Berkeley City Council [offered to do so] if the University would deed it to them. . . . Well, Norton Simon was [at the
Board meeting to discuss the proposal]. He had [with him] a transparency of a painting by Franz Marc which he was considering buying, . . . and he wanted me to look at it. We made an appointment to meet for coffee after the Regents' meeting. At the meeting he took out this transparency and I said, “Let's not talk about Franz Marc. I want to know, did the Regents agree to turn the park over to the city?” And he says, “No.” I said, “Why not?” And he showed me a photograph of this topless woman on the truck and he says, “We can't have our students subjected to this kind of behavior.” He says, “Look, naked girls.” Now, naked girls are all over San Francisco and North Beach. You can see all of the naked women you ever can imagine, but he said, “We can't have this on campus, and we turned it down. And what do you think of this Franz Marc?” “I don't want to talk to you anymore. I'm disgusted. . . . You showed me a topless woman when I talked about a man being killed.”
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Events like this one must have colored Peter's relationship with other UC regents as well. But it was not a dramatic confrontation with Norton Simon that brought matters to a head. Instead, according to several friends and colleagues who were familiar with the situation, Peter was simply not cut out to be an administrative museum director. Later Selz provided his own amplified account:

 

It is certainly true that Brenda Richardson, whom I had hired and did not get along with toward the end . . . constantly undermined me. Walter Horn [head of the Museum Committee] urged me to give her the sack, but I kept her on as she was a very capable curator. She did expect to take over when I left, but I insisted that the job would go temporarily to Jim Cahill until a new director was in place. The main reason for my move from the museum to full-time faculty was, as I have mentioned before, that most of my time would have to be spent raising funds rather than curating or working on acquisitions. The funding of the Berkeley Museum was never set up correctly by the Regents. After I left, Jim Elliott set up a Board of Trustees, and the Museum began to operate almost like a private museum, raising its own money. This I did not need, as I could go back to teaching full time, which I enjoyed until the day I retired.
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Then, too, there is the fact that Peter and his staff were increasingly, as Richardson put it, “at odds.”
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An atmosphere of frustration and contention,
readily acknowledged on all sides, along with the lack of administration support for the museum itself, precipitated his departure.
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There is, however, disagreement about the precise circumstances of the end of Selz's time as director of UAM. The statements of the two main protagonists stand in direct contradiction, and Richardson challenges Peter's version, which casts her as difficult and even insubordinate. To her surprise, she was presented with a reprimand listing charges submitted by Peter to provost and dean Roderic Park. Acting dean Richard Peters delivered the document to her home. Peter was calling for her termination. Following his instructions, she provided the lengthy and detailed response required by the university.
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Whatever the actual purpose of this document and the subsequent details of the deliberations of the dean's committee, Peter left the museum and Brenda stayed. It appears that Brenda was in fact exonerated of the charges by the university, and she continued working at the museum for a year and a half before joining Tom Freudenheim's staff at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The accounts of these events from various faculty and museum staff all involve what were regarded as shortcomings of Peter's administration. The consensus is that Peter was seriously out of step with the university administration. As his successor Cahill put it, Peter “was good at making enemies.”
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Of the various accounts touching on this theme, one adheres strictly to the facts of the situation. Jacquelynn Baas became director of the museum in 1988. Avoiding the pitfalls of rancorous personal (and usually unsupported) commentary on both sides of the issue, her brief account puts the events in a larger university perspective: “The ‘bottom line,' so to speak, would seem to have been the fact that, despite regular infusions of cash on the part of the University for acquisitions, etc., the museum ran major deficits every year Peter was in charge—something that simply could not continue.”
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Tom Freudenheim, a supportive friend of Peter's to this day, also takes a balanced position in regard to the factors that brought an end to the Selz era at UAM. He acknowledges that he had left for the directorship at Baltimore before the “Peter/Brenda problems arose.” Having later hired Richardson to join him, he essentially echoes Peter's initial positive view of her abilities with his own description: “I did, happily, bring Brenda to Baltimore, where we had a
very close and productive working relationship. She is exceptionally able.” Still, his observation of her fundamental working style echoes that of her former boss, Peter Selz: “She wasn't into worrying about making friends or offending people, if her principles were at stake.”
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From this and similar accounts of infighting, one could reasonably conclude that the university had lost patience with the museum. As Jacquelynn Baas recalls, “I know Jim Elliott suffered from this, and I was still dealing with the after-effects some fifteen years later.”
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Regardless of the internal staff problems and differences between individuals, lax financial management brought down the director, as it often has elsewhere. Fortunately for him, he was hired with tenure and accordingly was able to realize his expressed desires for teaching and writing.

Selz's tenure as founding director of the University Art Museum lasted seven years, exactly the duration spent at the Museum of Modern Art. His friend Richard Buxbaum, law professor at Berkeley's Boalt Hall, sums up qualities that have followed Selz throughout his professional and political life:

 

Peter is not a man whom administrators can administrate. And as a result, to this day his splendid accomplishments in bringing [the Berkeley Art Museum]—both the building and the profile—to national attention have not been rewarded as they might well have been. And while this is only speculation, I would guess that for the two art departments, practice as well as history, having someone like Peter (and indeed perhaps anyone with a similar “outside” background) come into the essentially self-referential academic world—no matter how intellectually vital that departmental world may well be—also cannot be an easy or comfortable situation. That likely is a structural issue, but some personalities might try to adapt to such a setting—not Peter Selz!
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In
fall of 1972 Peter Selz closed the door on the director's office at University Art Museum and without a backward glance strolled across Bancroft Street, through Sather Gate, and onto the University of California campus. Crossing Sproul Plaza, he found his way to his new office and the second part of his Berkeley career, as a full-time art history faculty member. This academic “safety net,” which had been part of the terms of his accepting the museum directorship, was an arrangement that rankled some of his colleagues, and his welcome to the Berkeley academic club was lukewarm at best. There were various reasons for the reservations about Peter, but in one way or another they converged upon his approach to art history, which was object oriented and artist focused. His way of looking at and understanding art was more emotional than analytical, and his anecdotal method of conveying a sense of art as a
living entity, directly relevant to individual experience, was viewed by some colleagues as insufficiently academic. Yet this approach turned out to be a major part of his appeal to a number of the students at Berkeley.

Selz's problems at Berkeley, as museum director and professor, dogged him for years. He was a controversial figure about whom opinion seemed to divide into two extremes. An enlightening view of the perspectives of supporters and detractors alike emerges from the accounts of a number of his students, professional colleagues, artists, and friends. For some, Peter's appeal was almost charismatic, while others found him arrogant, self-centered, and presumptuous. The challenge is to find the authentic Peter Selz. A good place to start is with his students, those who most directly encountered his enormous enthusiasm for art and artists.