Unstill Life

April 14, 2014
The daughter of art critic and historian Peter Selz, called Mr. Modern Art when he “reigned” as the chief curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art from the late 1950s through the mid-’60s, Gabrielle Selz fashions a profoundly moving tribute to her parents in this memoir of her childhood, from Central Park West to Berkeley. Born the same year, 1958, the family moved from Claremont, Calif., where her father taught art history at Pomona College, to take up his position at the center of the modern art scene in New York, the author had a ring-side seat amid the so-called Irascibles that made up the corps of the Abstract Expressionists ever-present at family gatherings and parties—Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning et al. The son of wealthy Munich Jews, Selz was sent to school in New York in 1937. Peter’s elegant writer mother, Thalia, was his indispensable ally in the busy, influential art circuit, although Thalia grew frustrated and bitter at his serial philandering, and they divorced in 1965, just as Peter quit MOMA to start an art gallery at the University of California, Berkeley. Thereafter, Gabrielle was split between bohemian Greenwich Village, where she lived with her mother and sister in the Westbeth artist housing project, and crackling Berkeley during its hippie heyday. All tenderly captured by an author who knows art in her bones.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
Selz inherited her writer mother's powers of literary expression and her father's eye for art, and she draws on both in this arresting and uniquely illuminating postwar art-world memoir. Thalia, shy, introspective, and adventurous, elegant as a tulip, and of English and Greek descent, grew up in Chicago. Peter, born to a wealthy Jewish family in Munich, fled the Nazis, landed in New York, and connected with his relative and mentor, photographer and modern art advocate Alfred Stieglitz. Ambitious and gregarious, Peter became chief curator for the Museum of Modern Art and the first director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Selz spent her childhood among famous artists, most memorably Mark Rothko, and now crisply recounts an endless carousel of exhibitions, parties, affairs, rivalries, gossip, and tragedies on both coasts in incisive and abrading eye-witness accounts of outrageous behavior and radical artistic innovation, from abstract expressionism to pop art to Christo's Running Fence. She writes frankly of her father's epic infidelity, her parents' divorce, her nearly surreal sojourn in a communal Manhattan artists' housing project, and her tricky relationships with Peter's subsequent wives and many lovers. Selz's memoir of aesthetic fervor, discovery, selfishness, sacrifice, sorrow, and abiding love is compelling testimony to art's uplifting and, at times, diabolical power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)