ABSTRACT
Lonce Bndite wanted to turn the museum into a permanent collection, which would be a referential anthology of the development of art of the nineteenth century onwards. A lesson in internationalism came, as could only be expected, from the United States of America, where so many rich collectors at the turn of the century shunned North American contemporary art and favoured European art, in particular, French art. Germany was defeated and had to endure tough economic sanctions, so the budget for cultural investment was limited during the Weimar Republic which, like the French Third Republic, tended to broaden cultural expense rather than concentrate it on museums inherited from the Empire or on large new projects. There were also utopian plans and resolutions for change but these hardly ever materialized. Even countries such as Poland, imitated the aforementioned Museum of Art Culture; but the Utopian experiments lapsed when Stalin took hold of power in the USSR.
