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Such challenge as he has been offered for the same title in the international field has come not from a single painter but from the group called the New York School—Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and the others. But the challenge has become weaker within the last couple of years as these Americans have given increasing evidence of having reached an esthetic stalemate. . . . The exhibition, hung chronologically . . . ends with a group of paintings done in 1961 in which Dubuffet abandons an approach that had become very nearly completely abstract for one that is essentially humanistic. “I believe that my paintings of the previous years avoided in subject and execution specific human motivations.” 43
    Even the prominent critic Harold Rosenberg seemed sympathetic to Peter’s way of thinking about the artist. In a long and thoughtful review of a second Dubuffet retrospective at MoMA (1968), he quotes Wylie Sypher, who called Dubuffet’s art “the supreme embodiment of brute matter from which all human presence has been eliminated.” Sypher continues on this tack as he attempts to identify what separates Dubuffet from other modernists: “In Dubuffet’s painting . . . man becomes anonymous and both painter and figure are absorbed into a turbulent geography that has the quality of mineral or mud. Dubuffet reaches a ‘zero degree’ of painting.” 44
    This idea of total human absence, however, may be misleading, or at least incomplete. Looking at the same art in a less nihilistic way, and with an eye to twentieth-century art that preceded it, Rosenberg also quotes Selz from the earlier MoMA exhibition: “Among his [Dubuffet’s] contributions to primitivism are his aggressive formulations of its theoretical premises. ‘Convinced that ideas and intellectuals are enemies of art,’ wrote Peter Selz in his catalogue for the huge Dubuffet retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, ‘he began a systematic search for “true art,” untouched by artistic culture and unspoiled by contactwith the Western classical tradition.’” 45 Both Selz and Rosenberg seem to recognize that Dubuffet represented a highly original and thoroughly different artistic vision from that of New York Abstract Expressionism and its immediate American successors, but one that was equally valid and possibly more potent in modernist terms. In 1962, Peter Selz had insisted that was the case—that modern art was expansive and inclusive, bound neither by geography (including within the United States) nor by narrow definitions of what is significant in contemporary art.
    Peter took pleasure in introducing less familiar modernist art and artists, such as Dubuffet, to what he imagined to be a receptive museum audience eager to learn. With
Emil Nolde
, he did just that, returning to his roots in German Expressionist painting. Sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany, the exhibition was in fact a collaborative retrospective, by far the largest show ever devoted to the artist; Selz selected the two hundred works and wrote the long catalogue essay. Apparently people especially loved the watercolors. It opened on 6 March 1963 (see Fig. 14 ) and ran to 30 April. The exhibition then traveled west to both the San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Art Museum. What distinguished
Nolde
from the standpoint of Selz’s involvement was the collaborative ambition, an approach that appealed to Selz as a way to tackle large projects. At one point he and Seitz were considering a twoman show with Nolde and Beckmann, but they decided each artist was far too important to share the stage. Selz’s participation in
Nolde
and his book
German Expressionist Painting
, which had served to open up the field, were recognized by an award from the Federal Republic of Germany, signed in Bonn by the president of the republic, Dr. Heinrich Lübke—an Order of Merit, First Class, for