San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened a Clyfford Still exhibition at a moment when Still's reputation was already tied closely to the Bay Area. SFMOMA's artist history emphasizes his influential 1946-1950 teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, where he helped turn younger artists from social realism toward gestural abstraction. By 1976, Still was known as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism who resisted the New York School label and guarded the interpretation and circulation of his work. A museum exhibition in San Francisco therefore connected his mature, jagged fields of pigment with a city central to his early postwar influence.
The exhibition reinforced San Francisco's claim as a crucial site in Still's development and reception.
