More than a decade has passed since the opening of the East Building at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and to celebrate this event the museum has mounted an exhibition called “Twentieth-Century Art: Selections for the Tenth Anniversary of the East Building.” From the outset it was to be the purpose of this vast new edifice to perform two principal functions for the museum: to serve as its exhibition space for the showing of twentieth-century art, and to provide a large, flexible area in which to present temporary loan exhibitions of the art of all periods. On the present anniversary occasion, these two functions have been combined for an exhibition that brings together both the museum’s own collection of twentieth-century art and loans from private collections and from artists and their families. (The loans, we may presume, consist of objects the National Gallery would very much like to obtain for its permanent collection, preferably by donation.) Most of the principal exhibition space in the East Building is devoted to this survey, which will remain on view until the end of 1990—a remarkably long tenure for a show which, though large in size, is little more than a patchwork miscellany in content.

Both the scale of the exhibition, which includes more than two hundred works, and its two-year schedule can surely be taken to indicate that this event represents a concentrated effort on the part of the National Gallery to establish its East Building as one of