Director Neal Benezra played the long game for SFMOMA expansion

Riding an elevator down from his ninth-floor office in the curvaceously sculpted new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Neal Benezra laid out the two-stop mini-tour he had planned for a visitor. First would come the shaped abstract canvases of the late American painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly.

“For a pure aesthetic experience of a great modern artist, I don’t know that there’s anything better around the world than our galleries dedicated to Kelly,” said Benezra, the director of SFMOMA since 2002. “They’re just utterly beautiful, and bespeak what a modern artist aspired to do — work very, very hard to come to a signature style that was so your own no one could poach on your territory.”

Striding into the Kelly rooms, Benezra paused just long enough to register the visual music of the painter’s brightly colored notes singing on the pristine white walls.

“And here,” he said, after another short elevator trip to see the museum’s Gerhard Richter works, “is just the opposite. What Kelly set out to do, Richter in a certain sense challenges that assumption about what a modern artist can be.”

A photo-realist seascape, a borderline abstract view of Madrid and an array of colored squares that could pass for a paint-chip sampler at a Kelly-Moore outlet sent off signals like radios tuned to different stations. “You immediately see the range of possibilities, the stylistic extremes,” Benezra said of the German master, “as if on any morning he might wake up and decide to do something completely different.”

‘Quantum leap’

The whole thing had taken about five minutes, but this focused jaunt through the seven-layer-cake expanse of the greatly enlarged SFMOMA, which opens to the public Saturday, captured the director’s almost uncanny fit for his role as this museum’s leader. Benezra’s essential love of modern art, a native impulse for communicating it, his disciplined and orderly approach to any task, deep Bay Area roots and disinclination to showcase himself have earned admiration far and wide.

“Neal has accomplished a remarkable feat, and he has done so with elan and elegance,” said Glenn Lowry, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Lowry praised Benezra’s “sharp intellect, gentle engaging manner, abiding love of art and quiet determination. The new museum is a quantum leap forward for the institution.”

“Neal exudes clarity, confidence and discernment, which are all key characteristics for the leader of a successful building project,” added Lawrence Rinder, who as director of the Berkeley Art Museum opened his own new facility this year.

Video artist Julia Scher, whose “Predictive Engineering³” is in SFMOMA’s collection, put the case for the director succinctly. “He’s game. He’s lively. He’s thin!” she exulted at a thronged press opening, as she stood in full sun on one of the new wing’s open-air terraces.

Collection growing, too

The self-effacing Benezra, 62, might flinch from that kind of personal notice. But he and his museum are having their major moment, with much of the art world gathering to witness it. With its new $305 million Snohetta-designed building, SFMOMA has nearly tripled its exhibition space (to a capacious 170,000 square feet), grown its collection by some 3,000 pieces through an ambitious Campaign for Art program and opened with a 270-object showcase of the blue-chip Fisher Collection of mid- to late-20th century art by such seminal figures as Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein and Agnes Martin.

“The stock of San Francisco as a destination art city was already high. Now it’s gone way up,” said Nicholas Serota, director of London’s Tate museums. “This is a deeply impressive achievement.”

Fourteen years ago, when Benezra was hired away from the Art Institute of Chicago to become director of his hometown modern art museum, such prospects were at best a remote pipe dream. Mired in the post-dot-com doldrums, SFMOMA was carrying a structural deficit that totaled about 10 percent of its operating budget. “As a first-time director,” said Benezra, with dry understatement, “this was not a happy prospect.”

He and the board then proceeded to do “exactly the wrong thing,” by cutting spending and depressing audience revenue and donor support in the process. “We created a further recession because we weren’t programming aggressively and ambitiously enough.”

Arbus, Chagall, Kahlo

A run of popular shows — Diane Arbus, Marc Chagall, an attendance record-setting Frida Kahlo exhibition — reversed the trend. By 2007, Benezra was convinced SFMOMA couldn’t take the next big step within the Mario Botta-designed building, which had opened with 50,000 square feet of exhibition space in 1995. Once again, with the 2008 financial crisis looming and Gap founder Don Fisher and his wife Doris off in search of a site to house their collection in a private museum, the fates didn’t seem to be smiling.

But with financial powerhouse Charles Schwab as board chair and other significant collectors committing to donate important artworks, Benezra forged ahead with plans to expand. A $480 million fundraising campaign swelled to $610 million, when the vast and space-swallowing Fisher Collection came to the museum after all in late 2009, in an arrangement that places the art in trust at SFMOMA for at least 100 years. Forty percent of that $610 million, the director points out, is for the endowment, an investment in a vital future of programs and exhibitions.

Pinole Valley High School

Benezra has succeeded by playing the long game. His fondness for baseball, with its deliberate self-defining rhythms, is a natural affinity. But so is basketball, another love, with its demands for agility, pattern recognition and quick reactions. A devoted exerciser, the dark-haired, blue-gray-eyed Benezra retains the lean, rangy form and limber gait that made him a good enough basketball player at the East Bay’s Pinole Valley High School to attract some college scholarship nibbles.

He chose UC Berkeley instead, majoring in political science, and headed for law school. Sitting in an exam prep class in the fall quarter of his senior year, he had a lightning-bolt moment. “Suddenly it dawned on me that this was not what I wanted to do. I remember so distinctly getting up and leaving in the middle of the class.”

Benezra went straight to his parents’ house and told them he wanted to stay another year at Berkeley for an art history degree. His father, a high school art teacher, and mother may have been “a little distressed,” Benezra remembered, “but they completely supported me.” The family had gone on an art-centric European tour when Benezra was 13. “I can still remember the itinerary of the museums we visited,” he said.

Benezra went on to earn his master’s degree at UC Davis and an M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford. There he wrote his dissertation on the color field painter Josef Albers and met his future wife, Maria Makela, an expert on modern German art who now teaches at the California College of the Arts. The couple has lived in Noe Valley since returning here in 2002. They have a 23-year-old daughter who is a political activist in New York.

Benezra’s career took him to the Des Moines Arts Center, the Art Institute of Chicago (in two stints) and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. It may not have been systematic, but Benezra was grooming himself to be a museum director.

In his first job in Chicago, he recalled, “there were probably 30 curators, and I was number 29. Since I didn’t have that much to do, every time they needed a courier to take a painting on loan somewhere, I raised my hand. I got to see museums all over Europe, South America and what was then the Soviet Union.” Benezra spent some more of his spare time feeding a curiosity about “how a museum works,” from operations and budgets to marketing and education. On his second go-round at the Art Institute, he’d risen to the dual post of modern and contemporary art curator and deputy director.

Benezra insisted he’s not about to follow the pattern of a museum director leaving after a new building is open. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else,” he said. He has too many things he wants to accomplish here, he said. They include, in no particular order, broadening the collection and exhibitions beyond their predominantly North American and Western European focus, bolstering the film program (in partnership with the San Francisco International Film Festival), taking up design in a more systematic way, commissioning new works and writing a new strategic plan for the museum.

Benezra may not be the most dynamic public speaker; his personality just doesn’t incline that way. But when he gets going about making the museum “the most public and open institution possible,” his conviction is clear. “We want to mean more to more people than ever in our history,” he told the crowd at the press opening. He loves talking about the free admission policy for anyone 18 and younger. “It’s always the biggest applause line I get.”

The director knows that modern and contemporary art can seem “intimidating” and “difficult.”

“I’ve fought all my life against that. If you want difficult art, go look at a Renaissance altarpiece and try to work out the iconography,” he said. “Contemporary art is something anyone can come to. We want to make this place as welcoming as it can be for that to happen.”

SFMOMA

Hours and info: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily (Thursdays until 9 p.m.) beginning May 14. $19-$25 (free, 18 years and under). 151 Third St., S.F. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org/tickets

Reopening: The museum officially opens to the public Saturday, but tickets for that day are already oversubscribed. Advance tickets (online only until Saturday) for later days are highly recommended.