MFA takes a new road

Kevin Murphy hasn't been to the Museum of Fine Arts in 30 years, since a girlfriend dragged him to see a show he can't remember. Nothing against the old masters. It's just that the Framingham lawyer prefers spending his free time in his garage, tinkering with an Alfa Romeo.

Then he heard that the MFA was having a car show and that one of the 16 vintage automobiles on display would be a 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 Mille Miglia.

''It's the exact same model and year that won the first Grand Prix in the United States held after World War II," Murphy said. ''I've got to look at it."

So Murphy and his buddies are plotting a guys' night out. They're eager to see ''Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection," which opens to museum patrons March 2 and the general public March 6. For car guys, the MFA's nontraditional exhibition offers a rare chance for time with some of the world's rarest and priciest racing machines, a collection built largely over the past 30 years by the fashion designer who created Polo.

For the museum, the show has another function: to reach more men. The museum, noted for its flowery Impressionist works, says women visitors outnumber men, 64 percent to 36 percent.

''Our work is to bring art into people's lives," said the MFA's director, Malcolm Rogers. ''It's not just to preach to the converted, but to make conversions."

To get men in the door, the MFA has taken out ads in Sports Illustrated, Car Collector, and Sports Car Market. It has networked with car clubs, inviting many gearheads to the museum's black-tie gala on Friday.

For the show, exhibit designers have stripped bare the walls of the Gund Gallery, painted them bright white, and added black carpet. A film of car footage will roll continuously in three sections of the gallery.

The museum has also organized ''Hoods Up" nights, when guys can gawk at the engines of Lauren's pricey automobiles, the hoods either raised or removed.

So far, the outreach has been working. There's enough buzz to make Rogers think the show can match the success of another offbeat show, 2000's ''Beautiful Curves: The Art of the Guitar."

''When this invitation landed on my desk for the gala, my assistant put it right on the top," said Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck, a car collector who plans to go to the show. ''Normally, the MFA invitations wouldn't be right at the top."

Museums have known they've had a man problem for some time. A study conducted for the National Endowment for the Arts found that in 2002, 55 percent of the adults going into an art museum or a gallery were women.

''There's a real consensus that it's important for museums to reach out to a broader demographic," said Jason Hall, director of government relations for the American Association of Museums. ''It's not enough just to have cool stuff. It doesn't do any good if people don't see it."

Men aren't the only group Rogers has targeted. During his 10-year tenure, the MFA has expanded the museum's educational programs to attract more school children, hired an outreach director to help build a better relationship with the city's minority groups, and even started booking alternative rockers to bring in the hipster crowd.

But no outreach effort has received as much attention -- or criticism -- as the museum's exhibition choices. Rogers's detractors says he has a weakness for shallow shows that are overly commercial, as epitomized by the MFA's 1996 exhibition featuring the work of fashion photographer Herb Ritts. But the Ritts show is the ninth most popular in the MFA's history, drawing more than 250,000 to Huntington Avenue. Rogers has more modest expectations for the Lauren show, more along the lines of the ''Art of the Guitar" exhibition, which drew 140,000. Rogers also hopes that a new audience, men, will make plans to go to the museum again.

''If you can make people make their first visit, they may make another," he said.

Patricia Hills, a Boston University art history professor and longtime critic of Rogers, remained unconvinced. She noted the $7 special exhibition price for adults, which is on top of the MFA's $15 general admission cost for nonmembers.

A museum membership, which comes with two free tickets to each special exhibition, starts at $50 a year.

''They ought to focus more on making it a little cheaper so people who are not museum members and can't afford a museum membership can come in," she said.

The MFA isn't the first museum to feature cars; the Modern Museum of Art in New York held a show called ''8 Automobiles" in 1951. And in 1998, the Guggenheim in New York organized ''The Art of the Motorcycle," a wildly popular show that saw tattooed bikers in leather vests waiting in lines with suburban families to enter the museum.

What got Rogers thinking about cars at the MFA was ''Moving Beauty," a 1995 show at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. He mentioned the notion to Langdon Wheeler, a museum supporter and car collector, who then put Rogers in touch with an Essex-based mechanic to the millionaires, Paul Russell.

Many of Lauren's cars are worked on at Russell's shop. It didn't take Rogers much effort to persuade Lauren to loan portions of his collection to the MFA.

''I always had a vision of the cars as art, but I called it moving art," Lauren said last week in a phone interview from Jamaica, where he owns a home. ''When my friends were buying paintings, I was buying cars."

In New York, Lauren met with Rogers and the show's curator, Darcy Kuronen. The MFA picked the cars for the show and received no financial support from Lauren, museum officials said. But Lauren did have some influence. In those meetings, he made it clear he didn't think the Gund Gallery, the space for temporary exhibits, should be decorated much.

''I suggested it be white and clean with black floors," said Lauren, ''a clean, white gallery with pieces of art."

Kuronen, who acknowledges he's not a car guy, did realize the show's potential to draw people who normally don't come to the MFA. The MFA's curator of musical instruments, he also organized the guitar show in 2000.

''Ever since that closed, people around the museum ask me, 'When are you going to do something like that again?' " Kuronen said.

Instead of other art-world types, Kuronen consulted John Sweeney, executive director of Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, as he planned the exhibition.

''I told him I didn't think they had to do anything around the cars," Sweeney said. ''The cars would be the message. They didn't need to have a lot of posters, photographs, or trophies. These cars stand very much on their own."

Sweeney and the MFA worked up a crosspromotion plan in which a ticket to one museum would permit a discount at the other. Sweeney also opened his Rolodex, sending the MFA to the leaders of the region's most popular car clubs.

That helped put the museum in touch with people like Dave Pratt, a Dedham collector and member of Velocissima, a club for Alfa Romeo owners in New England. Pratt's wife, Vivian, is an artist and a member of the MFA. Pratt, 57, doesn't spend much time at the museum.

''There's a breed of person to whom putting a beefier camshaft into your Alfa Romeo is a lot more interesting than going to see pictures on the wall," he said.

But Pratt has been out to Russell's place and seen many of the cars in the show. Four of Lauren's cars are there permanently, and another four are in a regular rotation.

''There's a whole room where Ralph's cars are kept," he said. ''It's literally a museum."

Tom Clifford, a Holliston architect and editor of the American Bugatti Club's magazine, was invited to the gala. He decided, in return, to become an MFA member.

He also began plotting out a dramatic arrival to the museum. He's waiting to hear back from the MFA about a good date, but he and a few car-club friends hope to roll down Huntington Avenue in their Bugattis, parking the French automobiles out front.

WBUR, the producer of National Public Radio's popular ''Car Talk," also signed on. It will hold a special event, which is still being planned.

Ray Magliozzi, who hosts ''Car Talk" with his brother, Tom, said he expects many of the gearheads heading to the MFA for the first time to be pleasantly surprised.

''Not only is the artwork beautiful, but they're going to find out there are a lot of cute gals there," Magliozzi said.

''Any place that doesn't attract men and is still in business is worth going to."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.