Between the 1900s and the eve of the Second World War, European museums, whose collections were constantly growing, underwent a double crisis, to which they responded with varying degrees of success.
On the one hand, museums were experiencing a crisis of meaning, not only on the part of the public, whose attendance was steadily declining in the face of competition from cinema and other urban amusements, but also on the part of the intellectual and artistic elite. For the Futurists, in 1909, the museum was a "public dormitory", accused of a paralyzing pastism; in 1923, Paul Valéry described museums as "cemeteries" and, in 1926, Carl Einstein, as "the great cold room of white curiosity". German museums were the first to respond to this crisis by increasing their appeal to a wider public. Wilhelm von Bode invented a modern museography for his new museum, inaugurated in 1904 on Berlin's Museum Island: taking the opposite approach to the large galleries that exhausted the public, and the overcrowding of picture rails accumulating works in several registers, he designed very small, sober, varied and rhythmic rooms, alternating paintings and sculptures, and giving air to the works. British and then French museums were inspired by this approach: when the collections were reinstalled in 1920, the Louvre gave the works more space. Another way out of the museum crisis was to work more closely with the working classes: the first congress was held in Germany in 1904 and, in the 1920s, new technologies were used to serve the public, such as the gramophone on wheels in Berlin and the use of cinema - it was Hans Curlis who came up with the idea of filming Berlin's museums, innovating in the shots to show the works from a new angle, as well as behind the scenes.
At the same time, European museums were experiencing a heritage crisis, threatened by the inability to enrich their collections in their own markets, in the face of competition from the United States. Thanks to their strong currency and the shift in economic hegemony after the First World War, American collectors and museums were able to acquire works from European museums - as was the case, for example, with the Russian auctions at the end of the 1920s, which dispersed masterpieces from the Hermitage - and even to dismantle and transport entire monuments at their own expense, of which the Cloisters Museum in New York is an emblematic example. Faced with this threat, European states legislated, such as Germany, which drew up a "list of works of national importance", prohibited from export, with the aim of enriching their own national museums.
