Paul J. Karlstrom (Author) - Peter Selz Sketches of a Life in Art

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Karlstrom, Paul J.
Peter Selz : sketches of a life in art / Paul J. Karlstrom with Ann
Heath Karlstrom. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26935-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Selz, Peter Howard, 1919 2. Art historiansUnited StatesBiography. 3. Art criticsUnited StatesBiography. 4. Art museum curatorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Selz, Peter Howard, 1919 II. Karlstrom, Ann Heath. III. Title.
N7483.S383K37 2012
708.0092dc23
[B] 2011022766

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Illustrations follow

SETTING THE SCENE

More than a quarter of a century after Peter Selz resigned as director of the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California, and returned to the classroom, he found himself four hundred miles south, seated at a table at LAngolo Cafe in Los Angeles. His dinner companion asked him if he would like to go watch one of his former undergraduate lecture-class students paint on a large plastic canvas while a rock band played. Peter enthusiastically responded, Lets go! Shortly thereafter he walked through the door of the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard into a wall of highly amplified sound. Norton Wisdom, covered with paint, was furiously creating spontaneous imagery, pausing only briefly to transform shapes and marks, erasing here and adding there, in an ever-changing direct pictorial response to the music. The year was 1999, and this was the pickup supergroup Banyan, composed of some of the top improvisational jazz-rock fusion musicians of the 1980s and 90s, on its first tour. Wisdom was already becoming known as The Artist for his work with various bands and highly regarded solo musicians.

For all his support and promotion of the authentic modern art avantgarde, Peter found himself in a venue where he simply did not have the background or information to understand that he was amid a gathering of leading figures in music and art who happened to be in L.A. (and that was generally a considerable number). It was an important cultural evening, but of a different sort from Peters familiar territory. He enjoyed a brief chat with his former students attractive wife, Robin, who was there with their young daughter, Ireland. Soon, though, Peter indicated to his companion that it was time to go, to escape the noise. But he had gone there, as typically he made the effort when presented with the opportunity, to find out what he might have been missingand what he needed to know.

When asked a decade later what he thought when he saw Professor Selz enter the club, Wisdom paused a moment and then responded that his former teacher looked entirely at his ease, comfortable: Selz is never out of place in any environmentalways at home; never out of his element. He showed me what it is to be a human being, living fully the creative life. For him, art is not just a career; its a morality. In truth, this was not Peters natural milieu. Although many of his favorite artist friendsnotably Bruce Conner and William Wileymoved fluidly between the visual arts and popular culture, including rock- and jazz-derived forms, Peter prefers classical, what he might privately call serious, music. He is a fan of opera, Wagner and Mozart, and the German high culture he left behind in Munich when as a youth he emigrated to America.

Selz had no idea that Norton, sponge and squeegee in hand, was working closely with some of the most respected and admired artists in contemporary music, among them drummer Steve Perkins (from the band Janes Addiction) and guitarist and composer Nels Cline, along with jazz-rock violinist Lili Haydn. Nor did he remember Wisdom from the large lecture classes in which he held forth on modern art to thousands of Berkeley undergraduates. Furthermore, he would not have gone to the Whisky, a club he had never heard of, on his own. But when offered the opportunity, he took it, always ready for fresh experiences. Peter was, and remains, ever open to the new and untried, both in life and in art. The fact is that as a teacher, Peter Selz inspired many of his students in ways that affected the life choices they made. By his example and enthusiasm he demonstrated how to live life fully in intimate relation to art and in opposition to establishment restrictions. That was, even more than the information he conveyed, his great and rare achievement as a teacher, and it is the quality that many of his students, graduate and undergraduate, best remember and most value.