Imagine the Catalonian painter Salvador Dalí in 1932, fingers twirling his famous mustache, then putting pen to paper, obsessed with retooling the shape of the clock of his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory.

Did Dalí really mean to depict a ''melting'' clock, as most people think of the fluid image now, or was he reaching for an even bigger idea? Another metaphor?

Or fancy another Spaniard, Juan Gris, striking in charcoal the sharp Cubist lines that would become El guitarrista, the 1925 portrait of a guitarist that illustrated the cover of Gertrude Stein's A Book Concluding With a Wife as a Cow: A Love Story. The pioneering Gris, a tortured artist if there ever was one, was part of the American expatriate's inner circle. ''He is the perfect painter,'' Stein wrote in a New York magazine.

The Dali and the Gris are two of 80 works on paper brought from Spain to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach by Fundación Mapfre. Deceptively small, fragile, simpler than the masterpieces that followed or preceded them, they delight art lovers and carry a wealth of history.

20th Century Works on Paper from the Fundación Mapfre Collection: Picasso, Tápies, Miró and Others includes rarely seen sketches and illustrations from some of the most renowned Spanish artists from the Cubist and Surrealist movements and the School of Paris. Pioneers of the avant-garde, they influenced others, such as the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García and the Ukranian-born French abstract painter Sonia Delaunay, some of whose works also are exhibited in this tapas-style show.

Small bites, big flavor.

In these drawings and illustrations, one can see how the masters -- all creators who pushed boundaries -- explored their ideas in sketches, oils, watercolors and tempera on paper. Some of the images eventually evolved into famous works of art.

Picasso's Untitled (Arlequín y Polichinela), a lovely tempera on paper from 1924, demonstrates the master's use of the Harlequin figure and his explorations into abstract and figurative painting. In the ink-and-charcoal Constructivo con ferrocarril from 1930, Torres-García draws with almost child-like wonder a compact urban scene, a throwback to earlier works in which he tried to capture the hustle and bustle of the streets and port of New York.

''Drawing belongs to the world of ideas, to the realm of what the artist is thinking, and that gives it a very special quality,'' says curator Pablo Jiménez, managing director of Mapfre, a prestigious foundation that owns the Spanish insurance company of the same name. ``Before painting, before sculpture, before anything else, there is the drawing . . . , and one can see where the artist hesitated, erased, corrected, and we're in the presence of creation.''

And consider this: These works are so fragile that for every day they're on display in Miami Beach they will need to be put away ''in absolute obscurity'' so that they can recover from the effects of museum lighting.

''I cannot see these drawings as much as I wish, because I have to wait for events like this,'' Jiménez says.

As with practically every other show that features avant-garde artists working in Paris during the first half of the 20th century, this one has wonderful stories begging to be revealed.

Dalí's clock drawing, Solitude Mentale, belonged to French surrealist André Breton from 1932 to 1943. Tradition says that, despite Breton's early admiration for Dalí, he ended up deciding that Dalí had ''vulgarized'' surrealist ideas after the Dalian clocks made it onto the November 1943 cover of Vogue magazine. So Breton got rid of his clock drawing that same year.

And now it's here for South Floridians to behold.

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