CFA collects its thoughts on its future, its dreams

This title for a new series of exhibitions at the Center for the Fine Arts echoes more with pop celebrity glitz than with artful, museum-made ambitions. It suggests ``Dream Teams,'' those temporary gatherings of all-star athletes assembled with fanfare and big bucks to make a seasonal splash.

But temporary fanfare is just the opposite of what this new CFA series is all about. The Dream Collection exhibitions, to be mounted twice a year for at least three years, reflect the CFA's revised mission: to build a permanent collection of art.

Despite the important ambitions fueling this mission, the publicity the CFA has been getting lately is hardly the stuff of dreams. Its controversial decision last month to cancel a speaking engagement for noted art critic and Cuban citizen Gerardo Mosquera after a small, unruly crowd protested the performance of Cuba-born jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba at Gusman Cultural Center has deeply disturbed many arts supporters. They are rightly concerned that the CFA showed little regard for freedom of speech and artistic expression by beating a hasty retreat.

The CFA's dreams got another jolt last week with the news that the museum has its eyes set on a
waterfront home. According to the Metro-Dade budget proposal for next year, the CFA may join branches of the Historical Museum and the Museum of Science in a proposed ``Maritime Park,'' a 10-block downtown area that includes an expanded Port of Miami and a new arena, meant to draw busy traffic from port passengers.

It's an idea that deserves careful, long-range planning, not an ill-considered response to moods of the moment. In its current building, with an entrance elevated above West Flagler Street, the CFA is remote from foot traffic. But are port passengers the prime target for CFA programs? Will the site help the CFA attract more community attendance? ``I think there's a real desire to develop downtown Miami, to benefit both the public and visitors,'' says CFA Director Suzanne Delehanty.

The site raises another issue: Putting a permanent collection of costly art on the waterfront, vulnerable to corrosive salt air and hurricane damage, has obvious risks and may concern prospective donors of art to the CFA's nascent collection. Even Delehanty recognizes the proposed location's potential threat to art work and says the CFA needs ``to draw from research'' for answers.

Open since 1984 and first conceived as a kunsthalle, showing ever-changing exhibitions, the CFA spelled out its new mission to collect in the spring of 1995. The mission is to ``exhibit, collect, preserve and interpret international art with a focus on art of the Western Hemisphere from the World War II era to the present,'' according to a statement from the museum board.

But what, exactly, should that collection look like?

The Dream Collection series will propose some answers to that question, by mounting shows of work from renowned, well-made collections of postwar art. They are collections which Delehanty hopes will set a standard for Miami's fledgling institution, still struggling for an identity after four other directors have come and gone since 1984.

Moving forward

This is a laudable concept. It gives the museum a context in which to chart a forward-minded plan for collecting, rather than diving in to accept whatever big-name -- or not so big-name -- art is offered from influential patrons.

That context is needed immediately. The CFA board will vote on June 6 to approve a proposed acquisition policy. If the policy passes muster, the CFA can acquire art the following day.

So, and not a moment too soon, we have the first in this series: Dream Collection: The Human Figure. It features 15 works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and four works of sculpture from the collection of South Florida residents Norman and Irma Braman. Among the artists represented here are 20th Century masters Picasso, Miró, Matta and American sculptor David Smith, as well as seminal Pop artists Jim Dine and Roy Lichtenstein. More recent works include figurative paintings by Nancy Dwyer and Susan Rothenberg.

``We wanted to put our heart on our sleeve, to show what we'd really like to have in our collection,'' says Delehanty. She is aiming high.

Well-regarded collection

Hailed by New York Times critic John Russell as ranking among ``the top 10 of American museums,'' the Albright-Knox is widely admired for its collection of 6,000-plus artworks. It's especially known for its 20th Century art, with more than half of the collection dated after 1945. This signature postwar collection -- begun with major works by Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and others -- was initiated in 1955 by the museum's far-thinking director, Gordon Smith. To finance these ambitious acquisitions, Smith enlisted the deep pockets and visionary support of Woolworth heir and Buffalo resident Seymour Knox II.

The Norman and Irma Braman collection also enjoys wide regard in art world circles. The Bramans are annually cited on the ARTnews international list of top 200 collectors, and are listed among the top 25 collectors in the United States, a distinction shared with cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder and South Florida developer Martin Z. Margulies.

So, yes, Delehanty has tapped prestigious collections as models for the first of the CFA's ``dreams.'' The danger is that the show could be a greatest-hits shopping list, with names dropped so loudly your ears hurt.

She has generally avoided this superficial approach, though one could always tinker with selections made from such rich choices. Missing, for example, are the profound, stemlike figurative sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, considered a vivid symbol of modern angst; his work is in both the Albright-Knox and Braman collections. It would have also been thrilling to see that museum's 1984 marble sculpture, Nature Study: Eyes, by Louise Bourgeoise, whose interest in abstraction and surrealism would fit well in this show.

The museum's 1952 painting by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, Fruit Vendors, seems an obvious bid to local interest in Latin American art. One of Tamayo's edgier portraits of birdlike figures would have shown better next to Matta's 1957 Poly-joueurs des cartes, a tensely luminous scene of industrial automatons run amok, and a wry slap at the rationalism of French philosopher Descartes.

Repeat performance

Yet there are important, related works worth coming to see more than once. That's a prime virtue of a thoughtfully assembled private collection. In the lobby is Joan Miró's bronze Femme, from the Bramans, a massive earth-mother form recalling his biomorphic doodles, influential links between Surrealism and postwar Abstract Expressionism. It's a connection further illustrated in the gallery featuring Miró's playfully painted bronze Personnage and de Kooning's Abstract Expressionist drawing Woman -- a much more frightening, swirling portrait, from his famous series. (Though the Miró bronzes were made after de Kooning's 1955 drawing, they reflect Miró's earlier, influential style.)

The human figure -- beautiful, besieged, and a moving barometer of spiritual wealth and loss -- gets a richly varied look here. We see, for example, Picasso's vigorous 1964 The Artist and His Model, cleverly announcing the show's theme; Richard Diebenkorn's dreamy, nearly abstract 1957 Woman in a Window; and Susan Rothenberg's 1991-92 Chinese Goat, a tough, brushy painting evoking the muscular glide of horses and the painter's hand.

This range is generously thought-provoking, even if one show can't meet every visitor's dreams for the CFA. It does announce a vision worth working for -- as long as it's tempered with truly conscientious programming and intelligent plans for a future site. The city has seen one sports arena declared obsolete, and in several years the same may happen for a museum. Will we learn from past mistakes next time?