Julian Schnabel “Untitled (Self Portrait),” 2004.

Although Art Basel Miami Beach is still two months in the future, museums are starting to pull out their big guns and unveil the exhibits they will feature during that frenetic, international art week. The NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale is one of them.

Now under the direction of former MOCA leader Bonnie Clearwater, the museum is finding a distinct voice and creating a niche for itself. Case in point: a rather eclectic but substantial opening tomorrow night, “Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen.”

This trio spans continents and centuries, but is unified in its painterly base.

You may be familiar with Frenchman Francis Picabia, born in 1879, who became a force in the Dada and Surrealist movements; but he turned more toward the figurative later in his career. The Dane J.F. Willumsen is more obscure, but he was a founder of one of the early revolutionary art associations way back in 1891 in Copenhagen, when he pushed boundaries of traditional representation and more modernist aesthetics. Julian Schnabel is the most well-known of the grouping, a bad-boy of the New York art world in the 1970s and ’80s, a filmmaker (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), art purveyor (promoter of Basquiat), flame-thrower – but always underneath a painter.

The title “Café Dolly” helps links this disparate trio, as it references the first cloned sheep, one of the more controversial events of the 20th century. The exhibit features 75 paintings from the three, reflecting the ongoing tension between the figurative and abstraction in painting for well over 100 years now.

“Comparing and contrasting these three artists heightens our understanding of their entire body of work as each challenges conventional notions of taste, style and categorization,” according to Clearwater, who has commissioned a catalogue to accompany to the exhibit. “Their use of figuration based on found images from the history of art, popular culture, folk art and even thrift store painting was not a rejection of modern art at a time when abstract art was the dominant order, but was rather the result of their philosophical inquiry into the very nature of aesthetics.”

To kick it all off, Schnabel will be in town to give a talk on Sunday, discussing his wide variety of work, the state of painting, the art scene – no soft opening here.

“Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen” opens Oct. 12, with talk at 2 p.m. (tickets cost $10, RSVP required, 954-262-0227) at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; www.moafl.org.