Peter Howard Selz was a German-born American art historian and museum director and curator who specialized in German Expressionism.
10 Facts About Peter Selz
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Peter Selz's family managed to escape Germany just before the Night of Broken Glass, with the help of some nuns, whom his optometrist father had treated for free.
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Peter Selz spent one year at Columbia University and discovered that he was distantly related to Alfred Stieglitz, who became his mentor.
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Peter Selz received several Fulbright scholarships in the following years to study at the University of Paris and Ecole du Louvre as well as the Musees Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire; at the same time, Selz was teaching at the University of Chicago and chaired the education department at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
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In 1958, Selz became the curator of department of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Subsequent major exhibitions curated by Peter Selz included Jean Tinguely's kinetic, self-destroying sculpture "Homage to New York"; the first Rodin retrospective in the United States; and a comprehensive 1965 exhibition of work by Alberto Giacometti.
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Peter Selz served as Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley from 1965 to 1988; at the same time, he served as the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum from 1965 to 1973.
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Peter Selz brought an unorthodox and irreverent approach to his selection of artists.
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In 1976, Peter Selz served as project director for Christo's Running Fence, a 24.5-mile long fabric fence installed in the Marin County hills.
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Peter Selz died in Albany, California, on June 21,2019, at the age of 100.