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By Paul J. Karlstrom

“[Peter Selz] is a readable account packed with information about the workings of art museums on both coasts, but in a larger sense, it is an intellectual bildungsroman recounting a life in art that never stopped evolving.”—Artillery

“A fascinating account of an individual who has made many contributions to art history and who has advocated on behalf of critical, often controversial or unrecognized artists here and abroad.”—Washington Independent Review Of Books

“While few great biographies are written of a living subject, Karlstom’s book is like a moving still life, a black-and-white painting richly colored, a silent movie in which every character speaks to be heard. Peter Selz was a great subject, and Karstrom matched him with a great biography.”—European Legacy

This absorbing biography, often conveyed through Peter Selz’s own words, traces the journey of a Jewish-German immigrant from Hitler’s Munich to the United States and on to an important career as a pioneer historian of modern art. Paul J. Karlstrom illuminates key historical and cultural events of the twentieth-century as he describes Selz’s extraordinary career—from Chicago’s Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), to New York’s Museum of Modern Art during the transformative 1960s, and as founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Karlstrom sheds light on the controversial viewpoints that at times isolated Selz from his colleagues but nonetheless affirmed his conviction that significant art was always an expression of deep human experience. The book also links Selz’s long life story—featuring close relationships with such major art figures as Mark Rothko, Dore Ashton, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, and Christo—with his personal commitment to political engagement.

Hardcover
286 pages
University of California Press, 2012
6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN 9780520269354
German History, Biography