Bass Museum building on Collins Park.

Silvia Karman Cubiñá, the recently hired Bass Museum of Art executive director and chief curator, speaks of her new workplace as if it were a gawky teenager on the verge of a growth spurt: “The museum wanted to go to the next stage; it was asking for it!” she enthuses while walking through the Bass’s lobby, pausing before Pedro Reyes’s fun-houselike 2003 sculpture Double Bubble. Just as its name implies, Reyes’s “socially interactive” conjoined bubbles are perfect for clambering into, and the museum’s security guards have been instructed to let visitors do just that, Cubiñá says. Of course, the sight of children scampering about Reyes’s sculpture is in stark contrast to the august Renaissance tapestries hanging upstairs. Which is exactly the point.

“There’s a feeling that the Bass Museum is at a new juncture,” Cubiñá says. “With a new president,”—heavyweight Miami Beach collector and philanthropist George Lindemann—“with me coming on, with Art Basel having matured in this city. Everything’s coming together. You can’t help but be excited!”

Still, Cubiñá cautions that she isn’t about to let her aesthetic ward simply run wild. In contrast to the museum’s prior hodgepodge exhibition history, “This isn’t about showing stuff,” she explains, her lips curdling around that last word. “New stuff comes into the museum each month, old stuff rotates out. No! There has to be a curatorial voice, there has to be a master plan.”

Bass Museum of Art executive director Silvia Karman Cubiñá with Pedro Reyes’s Double Bubble.

Indeed, a master plan is precisely what’s been missing from the museum since it opened in April 1964, when retired sugar magnate John Bass donated his $7.5 million art collection to Miami Beach—predominantly paintings by old masters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Rubens—with the proviso that the city build and maintain a special museum to house it all. “Miami Beach has everything but culture,” Bass, a winter Beach resident, told The New York Times at the time. “People are more interested in horse and dog racing than they are in paintings and music. I toyed with the idea of giving the collection to several institutions in New York City, but it already has most of the art in this country. Miami really needed it.”

Beach officials, desperate for an identity beyond that of a Rat Pack playground, and no doubt blinded by the price tags on all those blue-chip artworks, agreed to Bass’s terms, converting a Collins Park library into the collection’s new home and ponying up operating funds.

When members of the city’s music and fine arts board publicly cautioned that Bass’s gift needed closer examination, then Mayor Elliott Roosevelt (son of F.D.R.) refused. Soon enough, though, it was revealed that Bass’s largesse—and the accompanying massive tax deduction (what would amount to $52 million today) it provided his estate—came only on the heels of an unsuccessful attempt to flip his collection at a New York auction. Although expected to set new art-market records, when the bidding took place, nearly half of the pieces failed to sell. The word was out: Much of the artwork was fake.

Bass president George Lindemann.

When the Art Dealers Association of America eventually discovered many of those same dubiously attributed works hanging in the newly christened Bass Museum, they declared: “We believe that it comprises the most flagrant and pervasive mislabeling by any museum known to this association.” Pablo Picasso himself, asked in 1969 to authenticate one of his pastels in the Bass collection, sent back a photograph of the work in question with his supposed signature crossed out. In its place he simply wrote the word “faux.”

Wrangling between the city, Bass, and the art community dragged on: Bass claimed outrage at the accusations of deception and threatened to file lawsuits (none of which ever materialized), while Miami Beach City Councilman Herbert Magnes groaned to the Times in 1973, “The art world has been laughing at us for years.”

Chagrined city officials eventually removed the most obvious fakeries from the Bass’s walls—so much for Miami Beach’s own Mona Lisa!—without ever agreeing on a revised direction for the museum.

Last December’s Art Basel museum reception.

Accordingly, for the next few decades the Bass largely floundered, even as Beach taxpayers continued to foot the bill for roughly half of the museum’s operating budget. Not all of the core collection’s 800 works were fakes, but the museum’s leadership seemed unsure of just how to deal properly with that checkered legacy. Programming mostly revolved around traveling exhibitions, some interesting, many forgettable. When hip-hop figure P. Diddy rented the museum out for a July 2001 press conference, hoping to deflect a police inquiry, address an IRS investigation, and, not least, kick-start his sluggish record sales, his surreal appearance amid the Botticellis drew more attention than any show the Bass’s own curators had created in ages—and rightly so.

bass museum, Yigal Azrouël and Katie Lee Joel attended the museum’s opening during Art Basel.

Making the Bass relevant to the 21st century is part of what enticed Lindemann—whose name carries a hefty clout in the art world—to become president of the museum’s board. But Lindemann, a new father, says there’s a personal component driving his commitment: “It’s not every day that I get to help reinvent an institution a half-mile away from where I live, and where my kids are going to grow up. What an opportunity! How could I say no?”

He cautions that the Bass will complement, not compete with, the programs of other Miami museums (he remains on the board of the Miami Art Museum). “What comes out foremost is the opportunity to showcase the old alongside the new,” which means addressing the unclear provenances within the Bass’s permanent collection once and for all. A comprehensive research grant has been applied for, Lindemann says. “We’re going to cull through everything, catalog it correctly, repair anything that needs to be repaired, and if something is ‘inappropriate,’ it’ll be dealt with. But from that original Bass bequest of 800 artworks, there are plenty of important pieces for the community that other museums don’t have,” he says.

“Let’s just say that something is not actually a Rembrandt, but it’s in the style of Rembrandt, and it’s from that period. As long as we attribute it correctly, it’s still a great educational opportunity. Yeah, if you can afford to fly up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you’ll see a better collection of Rembrandts. But if you live in South Florida, and you want to be exposed to art from the 1600s, if something we have is labeled correctly, isn’t that a good thing?”

Gathering steam, Lindemann soon sounds just as giddy about the Bass’s future as Cubiñá. With a chuckle, he asks, “Did you know we have a mummy? An actual Egyptian mummy! Think of all the children in Miami Beach who would otherwise never get to see a real mummy!”

Mummies alongside the museum’s Mitch Epstein photos, Pedro Reyes’s sculptures alongside its Peter Paul Rubens paintings. It’s a heady combo, but one Cubiñá believes makes perfect sense. “Contemporary art isn’t being made in a void,” she insists, before correcting herself. “Well, good contemporary art isn’t being made in a void.” She points to the mission statement of the Bass’s April exhibition, “The Endless Renaissance.” “All art is contemporary, yet all art is contemporary paradoxically, because all art is constantly mining, escalating, and reconstructing the essential elements of the past.”

Alongside guest cocurator Steven Holmes, director of Hartford, Connecticut’s contemporary-focused Cartin Collection, Cubiñá has dived into the Bass’s holdings, looking for thematic connections with today’s artistic tyros, laying out conceptual links, and, she hopes, sparking a new way of looking at older work.

Come September, Cubiñá returns to commissioning new work (a role she previously held as the director of the Design District’s Moore Space, sadly shuttered by its backers in the wake of her departure), with a show from Miami’s own husband-and-wife duo of filmmaker Dara Friedman and sculptor Mark Handforth. As two of this city’s foremost art stars, the couple are, ironically, rarely spotlighted in their hometown—and never in concert with each other. “They’re right here in Miami,” Cubiñá says. “The chance to have them collaborate is just too good to pass up.” Moreover, she adds, no burg is better primed for being an art “crossroads” between past and present than the Bass’s South Beach environs.

Cubiñá recalls when she first began her job last fall, taking in the range of museum attendees, from an older lady in a wheelchair being lovingly escorted around the museum, to two young men wearing the skimpiest of hot pants—and not much else. Where else but on South Beach would such tableaux mix? “I knew right then I’d found my home,” Cubiñá laughs.
E-mail Brett@oceandrive.com.