Commentary : Too-Temporary Contemporary : The problem with MOCA? The museum has never made a commitment to permanently display the art it owns.

In the mid-1950s, Robert Rauschenberg was one among a handful of artists who changed the course of Western art. Combining elements of sculpture, painting, collage, photography and printing, he created a radically hybrid form to which he gave the logically descriptive name “combines.”

Los Angeles is home to the most extensive and important group of Rauschenberg combines in the world. The Museum of Contemporary Art owns 11 of these pivotal works, dating from 1955 to 1961.

Among them are some of the finest the artist made: “Untitled Combine” (1955), an early example featuring a stuffed rooster and a dandyish pair of white shoes; “Small Rebus” (1956), with its horizontal suture of color samples; “Factum I” (1957), half of a famous pair of nearly identical canvases that threw a monkey wrench into Abstract Expressionist claims of uniqueness and originality; “Coca-Cola Plan” (1958), whose altar-like winged trinity of actual Coca-Cola bottles established a Pop icon years before Pop had popped.

MOCA’s extensive, unmatched group of Rauschenberg combines is the envy of museums globally--a kind of postwar American equivalent of, say, the incomparable early Matisses at New York’s Museum of Modern Art or the remarkable group of 38 Monets at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. And if you’d like to go to MOCA and see these astonishing, decisive works of art--well, sorry. You can’t.

Rauschenberg’s combines are languishing in storage.

In fact, they are languishing in storage along with most of the rest of MOCA’s generally outstanding collection. The reason is simple: The museum has never made a commitment to permanently display the art it owns.

The absence of permanent galleries for the display of its collection is more than just a minor deficiency for MOCA. Instead, the absence actively hurts the institution. MOCA’s ambitious effort to become a critical factor in the cultural life of the city is severely hampered.

Why? Because a permanent collection is a museum’s anchor. A collection’s presentation in galleries devoted solely to that purpose--day in, day out, over the unglamorous long haul--provides a subtle but inescapable sense of stability and security, without which any museum seems adrift.

Temporary exhibitions are no substitute for the collection, no matter how inspired or inspiring the schedule of traveling shows might be. Indeed, the principal distinction between a museum and any other type of visual-arts organization is found in the regular public display of a collection, for which the museum alone commits itself as caretaker in perpetuity.

Individual works of art offer their own incomparable rewards, as they would under any circumstance. However, brought together in the unique context of a museum’s galleries, where they may be visited again and again as years go by, typically without fanfare and trumpets, they conspire to establish a sense of durable continuity, against which more transient elements of museum life are thrown into vibrant relief.

This vision of stability is essential in two primary ways: It establishes a critical relationship with the audience and with the art.

First, a permanent display of the collection gives the public an opportunity to develop feelings of warmth and intimacy with something as cold, distant and unfeeling as an institution. You can’t exactly get cozy with bricks, mortar, offices and monthly mailings.

Temporary shows won’t do it either. They can create excitement, like the delirium of a summer-camp romance; when the school year resumes, though, summer crushes inevitably fade.

By contrast, you easily develop deep and abiding loves among the faithful works of a collection. It’s comforting to know, even in the back of your head, that you can visit your secret lover whenever you like.

At the Frick Museum in New York, regular visitors feel a preternatural affection for Bellini’s crystalline vision of St. Francis. At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it is the mystically expressive color of Franz Marc’s “Blue Horses” that keeps them coming back. And who doesn’t want to see “Blue Boy” and “Pinkie” when visiting the Huntington in San Marino?

Famous works of art aren’t the only ones that establish this essential bond with an audience, a bond every museum needs in order to flourish and to prosper. The Norton Simon Museum houses many pictures greater than Jean-Antoine Watteau’s evanescent little image of a playfully voluptuous young woman who is reclining on an impossible cloud of white sheets; but I’ve never made the trek to its Pasadena home without stopping by for another look.

People even get nervous when their favorite is moved from one spot in a gallery to another. Imagine the pandemonium and disappointment if it were relegated to storage.

Affection for a museum’s collection cannot grow, except in meager ways, when it is not on constant view. Nor can the contagion spread by such emotions develop. A collector who begins to dream of seeing the major sculpture that stands in her living room transferred to the notable company of sculptures in a museum gallery she has come to cherish is obviously thwarted if there is no museum gallery for her to dream about.

An important paradox marks this critical relationship between a museum and its audience. Public institutions are truly successful only when they become private places--that is, private in the sense that any member of the public can feel the institution is his or hers.

This intimate feeling of connectedness takes time to ripen into maturity, while countless ingredients shape its distinctive character. None, however, assumes a role more central than the museum collection.

The second relationship devel oped by a permanent collection, permanently displayed, is the relationship with art itself. A museum’s collection can be of inestimable importance to ripening the curatorial staff, which is charged with sifting and sorting, writing and rewriting the history of art; to members of a public, whether collectors or not, who wish to sharpen or develop an eye, and to artists, whose own work is engaged in a dialogue with all other art, past and present.

Collections are essential for the resonant success of a museum’s temporary shows too. They create both a considered standard and an expansive context with which to measure the fleeting, usually narrower offerings of changing exhibitions.

Permanent collections sometimes languish because they don’t necessarily get the turnstile spinning the way temporary shows do, bringing in audiences (and revenue) for repeat visits. But the collection should be the obligatory backdrop against which the parade passes by.

At MOCA, that backdrop has been part time, ad hoc, often invisible--anything but a vision of stability.

The museum has organized numerous shows that do draw upon its collection, interpreting and reinterpreting holdings that are of surprising depth and distinction, given the youth of the institution.

“The Compulsion to Repeat: Repetition and Difference in Works From the Permanent Collection,” which opened several weeks ago, is one such show. (Rauschenberg’s “Small Rebus” makes a guest appearance.) Another opens today: the second half of a two-part survey begun last fall of the 30 works of installation art in MOCA’s collection.

These kinds of shows have been worthwhile, especially because art’s directions are neither as clear nor as monolithic today as they once seemed. More museums should take similar opportunities to cast their holdings in variety of lights.

But these temporary shows are not enough. MOCA needs permanent galleries for a permanent display of its permanent collection.

Eleven years after the museum opened its warehouse space in Little Tokyo, however, and eight years after its main facility on Bunker Hill had its debut, there are no signs of such galleries in the offing. Despite 80,000 square feet, making it the largest museum for postwar art in the nation, MOCA can’t seem to find the space.

Next fall, when MOCA reopens the galleries in its long-closed Temporary Contemporary warehouse, shows drawn from the collection are scheduled to remain on view for periods far longer than at Bunker Hill. An inaugural installation devoting 19,000 square feet to a survey from Mondrian in 1939 to Post-Minimal art of the 1970s will be exhibited for about a year. (The Rauschenbergs will be included.) But the warehouse is not climate-controlled--a conservation requirement for permanent displays.

Ironically, one of MOCA’s greatest assets remains hidden under a bushelbasket. The collection assembled during its brief life span already surpasses those at most American museums that focus on art made since World War II. If a commitment was forthcoming to permanently display the most important examples, the result would be uniquely distinguished in the United States.

MOCA should make that commitment, and make it before another irrecoverable decade slips by. Because, finally, it’s never too soon to start falling in love.