Peter Howard Selz (March 27, 1919 – June 21, 2019) was a German-born American art historian and museum director and curator who specialized in German Expressionism.
His 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.
He received several Fulbright scholarships in the following years to study at the University of Paris and École du Louvre as well as the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire; at the same time, Selz was teaching at the University of Chicago and also chaired the education department at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
His first exhibition at the Modern was the influential "New Images of Man" in 1959, which included paintings by Karel Appel, Francis Bacon, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Leon Golub, Balcomb Greene, Willem de Kooning, Rico Lebrun, James McGarrell, Jan Muller, Nathan Oliveira, and Jackson Pollock and sculpture by Dubuffet, Kenneth Armitage, Leonard Baskin, Reg Butler, Cosmo Campoli, César, Eduardo Paolozzi, Germaine Richier, Theodore Roszak, H.C. Westermann, and Fritz Wotruba.
[2] In 1961, he invited Mark Rothko to show panels created commissioned by Phillip Johnson for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building.