Peter Selz

Biography

Selz fled Nazi Germany with his family, arriving in the United States in 1936. He spent one year at Columbia University and discovered that he was distantly related to Alfred Stieglitz, who became his mentor. After serving in World War II he received an A.M. from the University of Chicago on the GI Bill in 1949. He received several Fulbright grants in the following years to study at the University of Paris and Ecole de Louvre as well as the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire; at the same time, Selz was teaching at the University of Chicago and also chaired the education department at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 1955 he moved to Pomona College to chair the art department and serve as director of the school's art gallery.

In 1958 Selz became the curator of department of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His first exhibition at the Modern was the influential "New Images of Man" in 1959, which included paintings by Karel Appel, Francis Bacon, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Leon Golub, Balcomb Greene, Willem de Kooning, Rico Lebrun, James McGarrell, Jan Muller, Nathan Oliveira, and Jackson Pollock and sculpture by Dubuffet, Kenneth Armitage, Leonard Baskin, Reg Butler, Cosmo Campoli, César, Eduardo Paolozzi, Germaine Richier, Theodore Roszak, H.C. Westermann, and Fritz Wotruba. Subsequent major exhibitions curated by Selz included Jean Tinguely's kinetic, self-destroying sculpture "Homage to New York"; the first Rodin retrospective in the United States; and a comprehensive 1965 exhibition of work by Giacometti.

Selz served as Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley from 1965 to 1988; at the same time, he served as the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum from 1965 to 1973. Selz brought an unorthodox and irreverent approach to his selection of artists. His daughter Gabrielle says in a 2014 interview that while he "came out to Berkeley just as Pop and Conceptual Art were ascending on the East Coast," Selz turned away from these popular movements and instead "identified with the irreverence of styles like Funk art," seeking to highlight the work of "ceramic artists like Peter Voulkos [who] were barely considered fine artists then" or Nathan Oliveira, "a figurative artist who did not follow the prevailing east coast trends."

In 1976, Selz served as project director for Christo’s Running Fence, a 24.5-mile long fabric fence installed in the Marin County hills.