Word: selz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ironclad's Shock Waves. "Seven Decades" has all the trimmings of a museum survey, including a 192-page catalogue. The show was picked by former Museum of Modern Art Curator Peter Selz, now director of the University of California's Berkeley art museum, from 151 private collections, 28 museums and 35 galleries. Instead of dividing modern art into isms, the exhibition weaves together art of different styles but similar dates. The insights available are therefore less preachy than head snapping...
...acknowledged masters or the exploratory frontiersmen of modern art. The shaping hand behind it and the earlier Dokumentas belongs to Professor Arnold Bode, 60, an erudite man with Napoleonic looks and energy who rules Kassel with scrupulous esthetic integrity. A jury of 15 members (four non-Germans, including Peter Selz from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art) aided Bode in choosing the entries, but shunned awarding prizes. Qualitative excellence is the aim at Kassel, and the one fixed premise is unconditional internationalism. Says Bode: "Valid art must be supranational...
...appears to arouse experts to belligerence, pro or con, and at the opening of the Los Angeles show, two prominent New York museum officials got into a public altercation. The antagonists: Peter Selz, curator of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, and Lawrence Alloway, curator of the Guggenheim. The paintings in the show are "limp and unconvincing," said Selz in a short talk. "It is the want of imagination, the passive acceptance of things as they are, that makes these pictures dull and unsatisfactory. It is as easy to produce as it is to consume...
...drawings in the Bremen show are portraits, but most are nameless nudes, many of them studies for future paintings. In the portraits, he proved that he could catch a subject's inner being, but his nudes go far beyond the limitations of the individual. U.S. Critic Peter Selz probably summed up Marées' contribution best when he noted that the artist always treated his nudes as "timeless creations of nature. Their significance is never that of the incidental but of some universal law." It was this quality that enabled Marées to span the ages...
Polish painters, as Selz found, have been relatively free to travel since Gomulka came to power in 1956. "They are swiftly aware of art events, whether in New York or Barcelona." Selz points out. In a country where to be educated often means to speak French, the main tie is still with Paris, and even the Poles have not always escaped being more stylish than profound. But if the splashy oils, crumpled collages and floating, ambiguous forms often suggest bolder and earlier experiments by better-known painters in the West, the passion and verve behind the paintings is pure Polish...