He Shows You Can Go Home Again

When Neal Benezra was around 10 or 12 years old, he went to the San Francisco Museum of Art, then a spotty collection crammed into an old building in the city’s civic center. One of the museum’s few strengths was its spectacular trove of Clyfford Still canvases, monumental abstract paintings made of jagged, slashing forms, one of which was titled “Self Portrait.” The painting fascinated Benezra.

“My first memory of a work of art anywhere is from this museum,” Benezra says, sitting in his new office at the current San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “I was completely confused but also compelled. How could Still have called this abstract painting a self-portrait? It remains one of my favorite paintings. A great, great painting. It has just a tremendous amount of power.”

At one point early in his career, Benezra tried to get an internship at San Francisco MOMA and failed. On July 29, he started work at the museum as its director.

Benezra takes over the institution at a critical point. In a decade, San Francisco MOMA, helped by the city’s booming high-tech economy, has vaulted from being a regional collection housed in rented quarters to a nationally ranked arts repository with a landmark building and one of the most aggressive art-buying programs in the country.

But now the museum is facing a world that is no longer booming: Attendance is on the wane, staffers have been laid off, and the museum patrons who underwrote the buying spree have seen their fortunes shrink with the stock market.

“The next year’s going to be a challenge, no question,” Benezra says. “Institutions have to readjust what are reasonable goals. We’re all struggling. It’s very hard to estimate revenue right now. What we have to focus on is creating a program that is sustainable.”

Benezra, 48, has been a curator for 20 years, most recently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was also deputy director, earning a reputation for his even temperament and incisive exhibitions.

“I’m a huge fan of his,” says James T. Demetrion, the interim director of the Menil Collection in Houston, who hired Benezra to work for him at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa and later at the Hirshhorn. “Good eye. Good guy. He would fit in extremely well anywhere, but San Francisco MOMA is really kind of ideal.”

Elaine McKeon, chairwoman of the San Francisco MOMA board, agrees. “It’s a great fit,” she says. “Neal’s very low-keyed, which is very refreshing at this point. It’s a challenging time to run a museum, and Neal’s capable of running it.”

The museum was founded in 1935, making it one of the oldest institutions devoted to modern and contemporary art in the country. But it wasn’t until San Francisco MOMA moved into its striped Mario Botta-designed building in downtown San Francisco in 1995 that the museum really attracted attention. Unfortunately, most of that attention focused on how much better the building was than the art it displayed.

In 1998 the museum’s board hired David Ross from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where his colorful personality and nose for controversy attracted donations and attention. Over the next three years under Ross, San Francisco MOMA’s membership and endowment almost doubled, attendance increased, and $140 million went to acquiring an enviable selection of artworks, including 22 pieces by Ellsworth Kelly and 14 by Robert Rauschenberg. In an entrepreneurial era, Ross seemed the perfect CEO for a brash museum in the cultural capital of Silicon Valley.

Then last August, Ross suddenly resigned. The press release attributed the parting to different priorities. One source of friction between Ross and the board was the fact that he had become involved with eyestorm.com, an online seller of art. After leaving his $400,000-a-year job at San Francisco MOMA, Ross became chairman of eyestorm and said he wanted to make some real money. In May the company went out of business. Earlier this year Ross became director of the Beacon Cultural Project, an urban renewal-arts project in New York state.

After a seven-month search, San Francisco MOMA settled on his replacement: Benezra, who was deputy director and a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“David was a great salesman; he was very externally focused,” McKeon, the board chairwoman says. “Neal is much more capable of running a museum administratively. That wasn’t David’s strong point. He wouldn’t have been right in these times.”

Benezra was born in Oakland, the son of a high school art teacher who was also an amateur Abstract Expressionist painter. He went to UC Berkeley, where he studied politics and planned to go to law school, but he decided to stay at school an extra year and pick up a second bachelor’s degree in art history. He earned a doctorate at Stanford.

He also spent three years in the early ‘80s working for Harry and Mary Margaret Anderson, San Francisco Bay Area residents who assembled one of the country’s finest private collections of Modern and contemporary art. The Anderson collection was given three floors at San Francisco MOMA for an exhibition in 2000, fueling speculation that the museum might someday get it as a gift.

Working for the Andersons was an important experience for Benezra. “I did everything,” Benezra recalls. “I installed the collection, gave tours, did writing, all kinds of things. It was wonderful. It kept me out of the library. Art history can sometimes become just another academic discipline.”

Benezra went on to work as a curator at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, then moved to the Art Institute and then to the Hirshhorn before rejoining the Art Institute.

Over the years, Benezra has organized shows of artists as different as Robert Arneson, Martin Puryear, Bruce Nauman and Juan Munoz. “I was interested in what was new and current in our culture and world,” he says. “I always gravitated toward what was new.”

With San Francisco MOMA’s pipeline of shows filled into 2005, Benezra says he has no grand plans to change anything and is still exploring his new home.

“All museums are different; each has a different culture, tradition, history, dynamic,” he says. “It takes some time to understand that. Learning a collection takes time. I want to learn the architecture as well as the collection. Learning how your galleries work is important in learning what’s possible in your institution.”

What’s possible, of course, is quickly changing. Benezra will have to figure out how to continue growing an institution that, at least on paper, seems to have peaked. Museum attendance hit a high in 1990, when 732,000 people visited, and has been trailing off since then, reaching 640,000 last year. Membership has slipped also, down to 40,000 from 43,000 last year.

Everybody, he says, “is straining a little right now financially. What an institution chooses to do, it needs to do well. Museums can’t be as ambitious in terms of the numbers of projects they once took on. The quality has to be maintained.”

But Benezra says the museum still intends to make significant purchases and says that it remains in decent financial shape. The museum’s endowment is about $80 million, 80% of which is in stock. The operating budget is $32 million a year, although to cut costs, the museum put in place a hiring freeze last year and then let go a dozen people this year.

“I want to focus in on the most important things,” he says, “building this collection, adding significant works of art, pushing us forward in time. There’s a great track record here that I want to continue: mounting shows that are important for this part of the country but also have national and international impact. It’s also very important not to focus only on cutting-edge art but to mount shows that have broad popular appeal and keep the audience engaged. You want to attract them and keep them engaged. It’s a great balance if you can achieve it.

“Modern and contemporary art doesn’t always come easily to the general public. If you really believe in what you’re doing and can communicate it, that kind of passion is infectious and it’s a very important part of what we do, not just to develop programs and make acquisitions but to be passionate about communicating it to the community. It’s crucial.

“It sounds easy. It’s not easy. That’s a lifetime’s ambition right there. If one can do a good job on all three areas, you’ve really done something.”

Benezra compares the Art Institute to an ocean liner and San Francisco MOMA to a yacht that can be steered much more responsively. Board Chairwoman McKeon adds that Benezra seems to be planning for a long voyage.

“One thing that he said to me was,” she recalls, “ ‘I want this to be my last job.’

“When he retires, he wants to retire from SFMOMA, and that’s good news for us.”