On the local museum scene, ’tis the season for permanent collection exhibits. At the Florida Institute of Technology’s Foosaner Art Museum, executive director Carla Funk dipped into the 5,000-piece collection and emerged with a group of paintings, prints and mixed-media works that are on display in the museum’s galleries now through Nov. 3, 2018.
Titled “A Look Back: 40 Years of the Foosaner Collection,” the exhibition focuses in large part on U.S. artists of regional and national importance, including paintings by George Snyder, formerly of Melbourne; Rick Piper of Cocoa Beach; and René Guerin of Vero Beach. The big American names include Jim Dine, with a 1996 intaglio bathrobe image titled “Red Sitting with Me”; John Chamberlain, with his 1977 Welding Series of five lithographs; and prints from the 1972 “Peace Portfolio” by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Claes Oldenburg, Marisol and Robert Rauschenberg.
There are more than a few surprises in this show, including a room devoted to paintings and etchings of ballerina Anna Pavlova by German Impressionist Ernst Oppler; a constructivist (and gender neutral) painting of Adam and Eve by Missourian Joe Jones done, evidently, before he became a darling of American Regionalism; and a 200-plus-year-old portrait of Catherine the Great by an unnamed Russian workshop. If it weren’t for the glittering breastplate of diamonds the tsarina wears, you’d think she was Aunt Bee, rosy cheeked from baking cookies for Opie.
Those objects are but a tiny portion of the Foosaner’s wide-ranging collection. Not on view in this show are its collections of East Indian metal work, Inuit artifacts, Spanish Colonial bronze stirrups and Roman oil lamps, not to mention a carved African elephant tusk and a small seascape by Edward Hopper, aged 17.
Prior to July 1, 2011, when the museum merged with the Florida Institute of Technology, the Foosaner Museum was called the Brevard Art Museum. It was believed that FIT would own and maintain the museum’s building and its collection and, with the help of professional museum staff, administer programs there for the benefit of FIT students and faculty and the Brevard community at large. Soon thereafter, a $1 million gift from the Foosaner Foundation – the last it would make before ceasing operation – was presented to FIT to operate the museum for the following decade.
Now in its seventh year of responsibility for the museum, FIT announced earlier this year that it will dissolve the museum, sell its real property and “relocate” the Foosaner’s collection in 2021. This is because FIT’s administrators and board of trustees determined the operation of the art museum to be “financially unsustainable for the university,” according to a Feb. 9 press release.
“Over time, it’s just become an untenable situation to continue to pour money in with very little outside support. We hope that the community will step up to preserve this community asset,” said Florida Tech President Dwayne McCay.
The founding of the museum back in 1978 was a grassroots movement, says Funk.
“The community raised the money,” she says.
“Some of the remaining founders still come to our openings and are still strong patrons of the museum, but they are very few,” she adds.
It seems that the fate of this community asset, along with its collection, is again in the hands of the community.
Funk says that the strength of the collection is its prints and works on paper.
The room containing the work of Ernst Oppler testifies to that.
“He was a master printer. We have lots of works on paper by him,” she says, noting that the Foosaner Art Museum has the largest collection of Oppler’s work in the world.
According to Funk, the second largest Oppler collection is in Germany. In the U.S., the prolific artist’s work is also held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., among others.
Born in Hanover in 1867, Oppler took his education at the Academy of Arts in Munich and afterwards moved to London to study the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. After his return to Germany, Oppler joined the Munich Secession, an association of young artists who protested the conservatism of that city’s existing artists’ organization. When he moved to Berlin in 1904, Oppler concurrently became part of the Berlin Secession, as well. It was in Berlin that he became obsessed by Russian ballet and, in particular, prima ballerina Anna Pavlova.
The subject of most of the Oppler works on display is Pavlova in “The Dying Swan.” Only four minutes long, the solo piece was choreographed for her by Mikhail Fokine in 1905. It is set to French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” from “Carnival of the Animals.” Pavlova performed it to acclaim throughout her career, famously saying on her deathbed, “Get my ‘Swan’ costume ready.” A video monitor in the gallery shows her dancing the role in a 1925 film, as the gentle sorrow of the Swan’s solo cello fills the room.
Ernst Oppler died in Berlin in 1929. In the following decade his survivors, fleeing from the Nazis, had the opportunity – and forethought – to take all the works remaining in Oppler’s studio with them to safety. Melbourne resident Susan Oppler Wood, the artist’s grandniece, inherited the works, which she donated to the Foosaner in 1986. For this show she generously lent an oil portrait of Pavlova by Oppler that remains in her collection.
The Foosaner Art Museum is also the repository for some significant works by Frits Van Eeden. Born in the Netherlands in 1944, Van Eeden first studied art as a boy under private teachers in The Hague. As a teen he went to Amsterdam for study at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Returning to The Hague, he became a member of that city’s Pulchri Studio, a Dutch art society.
Van Eeden arrived in Brevard County in 1979 and has become well-known and avidly collected by Space Coast art lovers. As an art instructor in the Renee Foosaner Education Center since its inception, Van Eeden has taught several hundred students over the years.
Van Eeden is particularly esteemed for his paintings and sculptures of horses. A muscular painting of a horse is on display in the current exhibition, as well as two untitled abstract figural paintings from 1985.
Many of the objects in the Foosaner’s permanent collection are the substantial gifts of donors who wanted to enrich Melbourne’s cultural heritage for future generations. When the Foosaner Art Museum shuts its doors forever, will these works remain with Florida Tech or be donated to other Florida institutions who will value them? Or will they be disposed of by sale to the higher bidder?
What’s going to happen with this collection? “That’s a great question,” says Funk.
“I’m trying to educate the administration about what needs to be done, so we can find a good home for everything.”
