Peter Selz Curator at the Museum of Modern Art
Peter Selz,the founding manager of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley and an influential curator and art historian, died the morn of Friday, June 21, at age 100. His expiry was announced by his daughter, Gabrielle Selz.
Hired every bit professor of art history at Berkeley in 1965, he was also charged with overseeing the establishment of the museum, which opened in 1970. Lawrence Rinder, the electric current director of what is now called the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Picture Annal, praised Selz'due south contributions. "Peter transformed BAMPFA from a modest university art collection into the internationally renowned art and motion picture institution it is today," he said.
Prior to the Berkeley appointment, Selz chaired the fine art section and directed the fine art gallery at Pomona Higher from 1955 to 1958. He was appointed curator of painting and sculpture at New York'southward Museum of Modern Art, where he served from 1958 to 1965.
At MoMA he orchestrated major surveys of the work of such significant figures as Max Beckmann, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Emil Nolde, Auguste Rodin and Mark Rothko. The shows traveled to other top museums around the earth.
Selz had a similarly stellar record at the Berkeley museum until he left the directorship in 1973. He continued as a professor at UC Berkeley until his retirement in 1988.
Just if the i-person exhibitions he organized were the staple of his career, it was his analytical grouping exhibitions that had the greatest influence on artists and art history.
His 1959 MOMA exhibition "New Images of Homo" was not a critical success, with its attending to figurative fine art at the meridian of Abstract Expressionism, and on the cusp of the Popular Art movement. Only it generated a lot of ink and was meaning in bringing to New York attention the work of artists from across the U.S., including Californians Richard Diebenkorn, Rico Lebrun and Nathan Oliveira.
At MoMA, he also organized "Art Nouveau" (1960) and "Futurism" (1961), the get-go major museum shows to examine those artistic tendencies. And his exhibition "Funk," at the Berkeley museum in 1967, brought 27 counterculture artists out of their studios and the coffeehouses of Northern California and into the public middle.
Peter Selz was born in Munich, on March 27, 1919. Fleeing the Nazi regime, he traveled lonely in 1936 to New York, his Jewish parents following 1 yr afterward, a story recounted in Paul J. Karlstrom's biography, "Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art."
He served in the U.S. military in Earth State of war II, and attended the University of Chicago on the GI Neb, receiving his graduate education at the University of Paris and École du Louvre. He was the author of more 50 books and exhibition catalogs, as well equally numerous mag and journal articles. And, for some years, he was a Due west Coast correspondent for the magazine Art in America.
Selz is survived by his fifth wife, Carole Schemmerling Selz; his daughters Tanya Selz and Gabrielle Selz from his first wedlock, to Thalia Cheronis Selz; his stepdaughters Mia Baldwin and Kryssa Schemmerling; and his grandson, Theo Mync.
"We only had a big celebration of his 100th birthday (in April), so at this signal we're not doing any memorial event," his daughter Gabrielle told The Chronicle on Fri.
The family asks that donations be made in Selz's name to the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Pic Archive.
Selz volition be cremated and his ashes sprinkled on a cemetery plot he bought in Olema, close to the grave of artist Sam Francis. "Brothers in eternity," he told Gabrielle.
0 Response to "Peter Selz Curator at the Museum of Modern Art"
Post a Comment