Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction
Poignant and candid, Unstill Life is a daughter's memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father known to the world as Mr. Modern Art. Selz offers a unique window into the glamour and destruction of the times: the gallery openings, wild parties and affairs that defined one of the most celebrated periods in American art history. Like the art he loved, Selz's father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on family life. When her father left MoMA and his family to direct his own museum in California, marrying four more times, Selz's mother, the writer Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian artist community Westbeth. Her parents continued a tumultuous affair that would last forty years.
Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints an unforgettable portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of modern artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.
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This intimate look at the art world's movers and shakers is from the perspective of the younger daughter of Peter Selz, a major curator and museum director. . . . It's an exuberant tale of artists from Rothko to Christo that makes the reader marvel that neither the daughter nor her mother ever rejected the rascal who both animated and complicated their lives.--Gail Levin, biographer of Edward Hopper, Judy Chicago, and Lee Krasner
For a first book it's impressive; actually for a second or third book it would still be a contender, with lean engaging prose, an alertness for detail, and her consummate storytelling. One of the season's surprises.--James Croak
A poignant, poetic, vivid picture of a New York populated by debaucherous dreamers, Selz's memoir is personal, brave, and touches not only on the complicated and intricate love her parents had for each other and their children, but also an epic time in American art history.--Royal Young
Selz's reminiscences of coming of age amidst an explosion of creativity and social change are clear-eyed, sympathetic--and sometimes heartbreaking.
[A] page-turner [with a] unique point of view... Beautifully told and compelling.--John Seed
[A] candid daughter-father memoir... [Selz's] evocation of her father's long life explores the bittersweet intersection of modern art and modern family, and the collateral damage of the sexual revolution.--David D'Arcy
