Peter Selz Read Online Free PDF Page A

are . . . anti-machines. They make anarchy. They represent a freedom that without them wouldnot exist. They are pieces of life that have jumped out of the systems: out of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. To try to conserve the situation that exists will make a man unhappy, because it is hopeless. This kind of art accepts changes, destruction, construction and chance. These machines are pure rhythm, jazz-machines
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    Selz seemed to relish his “embattled” position, viewing the controversy surrounding his shows as a sure sign of their success. He was open to exploring movements that had gone out of fashion, such as Art Nouveau, or individual artists, such as Dubuffet, who had not gained acclaim in the United States. From contemporary accounts and reviews it would appear that this approach generally kept things fresh and provocative—though in the case of
Art Nouveau
, the direction was more toward nostalgia.
    Art Nouveau, in Peter’s view, had been totally neglected. His personal attraction to the style lay in the ways it had influenced modernist art, as he explained in the catalogue: “Scholarly investigations on Art Nouveau began to be published in the 1930s, but it was not until 1952 that the first all-inclusive exhibition of the movement was organized by the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich. The recent turnabout in the evaluation of Art Nouveau calls for renewed interpretation and, above all, a definition of this elusive style . . . in which a specific creative force broke with the historicism of the past to prepare the ground for the art of this century.” 25
    Peter is convinced that this exhibition, which opened in the summer of 1960, introduced Art Nouveau to an American audience and ignited the stylistic movement that came to dominate graphic and fashion design for much of that decade. The omnipresent Peter Max ashtrays and the stylized flowing lines of album covers and rock poster art testified to Art Nouveau’s impact on visual youth culture of the time. And almost every young couple decorating their first “pad” aspired to a Tiffany lamp, inevitably settling for one of the hundreds of copies, most of indifferent if not dreadful craftsmanship. Selz provides an amusing anecdote about the exhibition and changing tastes: “A man who sounded like a little old lady on the telephone said: ‘Mr. Selz, you did a terrible thing.’ ‘So what did I do?’ And he said, ‘Well, I inherited this large quantity of Tiffanyglass from my family, and with the Museum of Modern Art doing nothing but good design, the Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe kind of design, I sold it all for a song. And now that you bring it [Art Nouveau] back, I have nothing left!’” 26
    Selz also recalls more important things about the show, not the least of which was that he was told it was the first time since the museum’s opening that every department had worked together.
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    Architecture, painting and sculpture, photography, and design departments, we all worked together. I was in overall charge, but we presented the exhibition together. And Drexler installed it beautifully. It was a very exciting thing because it was the first time that people reexamined Art Nouveau, not only as an important international movement, but [as] something historically important. . . . We put together a book rather than [the usual] catalogue, with four contributors on different aspects. I wrote the painting and sculpture section, Alan Fern did the graphics, Greta Daniel did three-dimensional design, and Henry Russell Hitchcock, architecture. . . . Now the literature is so enormous, but this was the first thing published in English as a reexamination of Art Nouveau. 27
    Peter had a firm grasp on the significance of his exhibition. Beyond the virtue of providing the opportunity for people to look at utilitarian objects in a new way and recognize the shared design that makes them