March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Nicholas Penny, the new director of London's National Gallery, signaled that he will abandon efforts by his predecessor to display works of modern and contemporary art.

The gallery's previous director, Charles Saumarez Smith, had disputed the 1900 cutoff date for the art it was allowed to show, and sought to offer more modern and contemporary works. Those works are commonly found at Tate Modern or Tate Britain.

``We do not want to concern ourselves seriously with any art of the 20th or 21st century without discussing the matter with our colleagues at Tate Modern or Tate Britain,'' Penny said at a press breakfast. ``I hope relations with Tate will be very good.''

``It would not be a major part of my acquisition policy at present to buy 20th-century works of art,'' Penny said.

Penny's arrival on Feb. 4 ended a power vacuum at the institution that lasted half a year. Saumarez Smith left for the Royal Academy of Arts in August after disagreements with the National Gallery board's chairman Peter Scott.

The 1900 cutoff point for works displayed in the gallery was set before the year 2000 birth of Tate Modern, London's museum of modern and contemporary art. In an art swap, a total of 52 paintings were transferred from Tate to the National Gallery, while 14 went from the Gallery to the Tate.

Art Date

During his five-year tenure, Saumarez Smith questioned that arrangement. ``I personally have reservations about the idea that old culture stops in December 1899, and the modern world starts,'' he told Bloomberg News in January 2006. ``Now we're in the 21st century, we can be reasonably confident that there was plenty of great art in the early 20th century, and if the institution is to display great art, then you need to feel there's a continuity to it.''

Penny said today that he would rather focus on filling gaps in the 19th-century section. While it is rich in French works, he said, it could use more German art by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, or Italian art by the likes of Francesco Hayez.

Referring to his five years in the U.S. -- as senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. -- Penny said encouraging ``major collectors'' to back the gallery and later bequeath art to it was ``really important and something we should do here.''

Before moving to the U.S., Penny was at the National Gallery for 12 years. He said he will announce the lineup of coming exhibitions at a subsequent press conference, and vowed to maintain the tradition of putting on shows that link directly to the works in the collection.

The press breakfast was organized to present Penny's latest published work, the second volume of a National Gallery catalog of 16th-century Italian paintings. Penny's research for the voluminous publication dedicated to Venice led to the discovery that Veronese's ``The Rape of Europa'' is an original, not a copy, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Farah Nayeri in London at farahn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 26, 2008 10:11 EDT