![]() The formation of the National Gallery of Art was a particularly complex undertaking. In time such rules would prove arbitrary and unworkable for both the modern museum and national gallery alike. Such clear-cut collecting and exhibiting rules were, however, ultimately futile attempts to resolve dilemmas that 20th-century museums were constantly being confronted with in multiple forms, with new styles rapidly superseding each other and the present receding into the past at an ever faster rate. At the time, these kinds of restrictions were a way for both of these young institutions to more sharply define themselves in relation to each other and to differentiate their missions from other museums. A decade later, the National Gallery of Art self-consciously distanced itself from contemporary art by adopting policies that prohibited the Gallery from including and exhibiting paintings in the permanent collection until 20 years after an artist’s death, and from deaccessioning. It would regularly jettison the past in favor of the present. įounded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) initially took the position that it would not form a permanent collection but instead deaccession works more than 50 years old. Further complicating matters was the uncertain status of American modernism during the 1920s and 1930s, when a general belief still prevailed that American art of any period was derivative and of secondary importance to that of Europe. ![]() The emerging institutions devoted to modern, contemporary, or, to use a period term, “living art,” which came of age at that time, had to either accept or challenge that premise. Ezra Pound’s famous imperative to “make it new,” rather than preserving the old, carried the day. The great modernist patron and poet Gertrude Stein posited the dilemma museums faced in the interwar period succinctly: “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.” One of the premises underlying early 20th-century modernism was that the new movements represented a break from the past and in many ways from history itself.
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