Jordan Belson

Jordan Belson (1926–2011) is a seminal figure in twentieth-century avant-garde cinema. He studied painting as a young man, receiving a degree in studio art from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946. He initially achieved success as a painter, exhibiting his work at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Guggenheim Museum, then known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in the late 1940s. After 1950, however, he settled in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and focused primarily on filmmaking. Although he continued to make paintings and drawings for the remainder of his life, he never exhibited this part of his work again publicly during his lifetime.