Peter Selz Read Online Free PDF

documents of creativity at a certain time, his complementary emphasis on painting and sculpture illuminated the stylistic design component. He was interested in pointing out the relationships between different categories of forms. In this respect, he was drawn to the international Symbolist movement and the unity of the arts: “Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Klimt—and my theory was that, with exceptions like Cézanne, let us say, or Renoir, most artists working at the turn of the [twentieth] century, especially the younger generation, were much involved in Art Nouveau or helped create it, as in the cases of Lautrec and Gauguin. . . . In the catalogue I start out with Debussy, [who was part of] a Symbolist unity that prevailed for about ten years.” 28
    Citing Gauguin’s decorative flatness, use of outlines, and arbitrary color (as in his studio door panel of 1899), Selz sees that artist’s designwork of the period—including decorative plates and bucolic scenes on vases—as closely related to the spirit of Art Nouveau. Gauguin’s affirmation of two-dimensionality is one aspect of his influence on other key artists associated with the movement: “Bonnard, in his activities as a painter, sculptor, book illustrator, lithographer, and designer of decorative screens and posters, is perhaps typical of the all-embracing attitude towards the arts of this period.” 29 Selz further points out the obvious influence of Japanese decoration, which permeated the style.
    Selz the art historian was always careful to look for the present in the past. He also appreciated patterns, recognizing that the course of history was meandering and even circular, with old ideas and styles being repeated and altered in a way that continued to unify the arts over time. In
Art Nouveau
, Selz reified that thinking. For him, modernism did not represent an absolute break with the past, and he explicitly underlined the connection between past and present in the
Art Nouveau
catalogue: “Art Nouveau claimed to be the new art of the new time. Yet its avowed break with tradition was never complete. In certain ways Art Nouveau actually belongs with the nineteenth-century historical styles. The century had earlier run the gamut from the Egyptian revival of the first Empire to the baroque revival of the second.” 30 At the same time, Selz concluded, with emphasis, that “historically Art Nouveau fulfilled the liberating function of an ‘anti’ movement. It discarded the old, outworn conventions and set the stage for the developments which followed with such extraordinary rapidity in the twentieth century.” 31
    Selz was not the first to recognize Art Nouveau as an influential precursor of twentieth-century modernism. Some of the most insightful writing on the connections between primitivism (which Selz honors in his essay), Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the fundamentals of modernism had appeared two decades earlier. In his classic study
Primitivism in Modern Art
(1938), Robert J. Goldwater provided a subtle and enlightening interpretation of the workings of artistic influence and appropriation, one that later was further articulated by Meyer Schapiro: “The accomplishment of the past ceases to be a closed tradition of noble content or absolute perfection, but a model of individuality, of history-making effort through continual self-transformation.” 32
    AlthoughSelz, who considers both Goldwater and Schapiro as mentors and models, was not the first to present these central ideas, he had one thing they did not: the public forum of the world’s leading museum of modern art. The popular visibility of the MoMA exhibition may not have initiated the 1960s vogue for Art Nouveau, but it could not avoid being a contributing factor.
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    Peter’s access to modern art has always been through the individual artists themselves. Among his many artist