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things are rapidly changing . . .,’ they searched with the fervor of disciples to new religion for the key which would translate their sense of the dynamic into painting and sculpture.” 40 One artist who learned these lessons and impressively applied them to his own work was Tinguely.
Homage to New York
was about movement and change, anticipating—among other things—kinetic art. But it was also created from junk, thereby placing itself squarely in the assemblage phenomenon.
    Before going to the Modern, Peter proposed an exhibition on assemblage that he called
The Collage and the Object
. Co-organized with William Seitz (who played the major curatorial role), by the time it opened in October 1961 it had been renamed simply
The Art of Assemblage
. According to Peter, the term was made “official” through the Selz/Seitz collaboration: “There was no word for this [before then,] . . . what was going on in New York with Rauschenberg and Kienholz in California. And one day I was working on the Dubuffet show . . . and he coined that word, a
ssemblage
, for his collages cut up from previous paintingsand put together [recombined]. . . . Bill looked and said, ‘Let’s call it [the other show]
Assemblage
.’ So, that’s how the term came into being.” 41 Selz insists that the French and English terms are neither identical nor interchangeable. The French term
assemblage
applies only to Dubuffet’s work, whereas the American term (pronounced in English fashion, not French) describes the MoMA exhibition and is now widely used to describe a specific phenomenon. 42 Exemplified in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, it is also still evident in some of the most interesting and inventive California artists working today.
    Peter believed that assemblage, like the kind of art presented in
New Images
, was being neglected. In the latter case, this neglect was due largely to the strong representation of figurative art among the works in the exhibition. Assemblage, in contrast, approached more closely modernist ideas about formalist abstraction. Its constituent parts—discarded junk—had a myriad of associations beyond themselves, but in no respect did their combination as art adhere to strict Greenbergian ideas about formalist purity.
    Selz’s next major one-person exhibition surveyed the development, from an increasingly chauvinistic American perspective, of the “outsider” French artist Jean Dubuffet. Selz represents his show as almost introducing Dubuffet to New York and an American audience, a claim that is not entirely justified. However, he did encounter this
art brut
(naive or “primitive” art) iconoclast in France many years before, while he was there on his Fulbright Fellowship. And Dubuffet was a hero in Chicago, appealing to sensibilities shared by some of the younger artists with whom Peter kept company in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But the important point is not one of discovery and introduction, but rather of the inclination and willingness to make the commitment of a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, in effect giving the Modern’s imprimatur of approval to a difficult foreign artist who worked decidedly outside the mainstream. And the reason for that seemingly bold step was Selz’s ongoing interest in figurative innovation as a viable expressive alternative to abstraction and related formal concerns within modernist art.
    In his review of the exhibition in the
New York Times
, John Canaday quotes a statement of Dubuffet’s that elucidates perfectly Selz’s attractionto the Frenchman’s art. Interesting in this review is the dramatically different tone struck by Canaday when compared to his harsh dismissal of the Russian American Mark Rothko:
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    For some years Dubuffet has been called the most important French artist since the Second World War, a position that he can now be said to hold without serious challengers.