NARRATOR:
SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra.
BENEZRA:
I think most curators and museum directors have a work of art in their past that was of seminal importance in their developing an interest in art and wanting to work in museums. And for me, it’s this painting by Clyfford Still.
When I was a young kid, I grew up in the East Bay, and my father was a high school art teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. And so I was dragged, not exactly kicking and screaming, but I was brought to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on a very regular basis. And I saw every exhibition in this museum for years and years and years, as a kid growing up.
One day, I’m in the galleries by myself and I come upon this painting by Clyfford Still, which at that time, I believe, was called Self-Portrait. And Still would later change the title to Untitled. It’s a painting that’s human scaled. It has a kind of a wonderful sinuous line against a black background. In no way, shape, or form would anyone in their right mind describe this as a self-portrait. I was probably twelve years old at the time. And I remember grabbing my father, who was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, bringing him over and asking him to explain to me how the artist could possibly have called this a self-portrait.
He explained to me that, in fact, for the Abstract Expressionists, it was enough to allude to the human figure, and there was a great deal of expression that could be brought to bear through this allusion, but you didn’t have to describe the human figure for it to imply one. And that, Yes, Neal, it was possible that Clyfford Still could call this a self-portrait. And this was the most important moment in my life, in terms of my getting interested in art, because I was really very young and I was completely captivated by the painting itself — which is quite beautiful and very stark and strong, and chilling, in some ways — this is not an optimistic self-portrait, this is a very tough, challenging one; and my father’s ability to explain it to me in an artist’s terms, in an artist’s own words. So this was the picture that got me interested in art and led to my subsequent education and career.
