In the old days, before lustrous JPEGs of every work of art ever painted could be shot ’round the world in nanoseconds, the simple act of placing something on view in a major institution such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Guggenheim was enough to confer canonic stature on it and the person who made it. Artists, dealers, scholars, and critics — not to mention the public at large — would not fail to notice the new arrival, and the work would speedily assume a prominent place in our culture’s discussion of fine art.

Those days are long past. The wandering loan exhibition has gained in prominence as the permanent collection, though still important, has receded from its erewhile pre-eminence.

But a sense of the impact of permanent collections is potently revived in a new show at the Guggenheim, “From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim.” Unless you happen to be of very advanced years, or preternaturally keyed into the history of Modernism in all its ramifications, your first reaction to the title is apt to be “Who was Karl Nierendorf?” Nierendorf was neither an artist, a patron, nor a scholar. He was a dealer, who began his career in Berlin as a banker before he decided to traffic in paintings and sculptures.

With the rise of fascism, Nierendorf fled to America, where he promptly opened a gallery that specialized in German and Austrian Modernism. Not coincidentally, his artists were precisely the men and women pilloried in that notorious exhibition that Hitler himself arranged on “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art”: Klee, Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and all the other Expressionists.

The main reason for the new exhibition and for its current venue is that Nierendorf sold many works of art to the Guggenheim when it was still known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. He was a trusted associate of Hilla Rebay, the legendary curator who was instrumental in bringing together many of the works in Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection. Upon his premature death, the Guggenheim purchased his entire estate.

In several photographs that accompany this exhibition, Nierendorf (1889–1947) appears as a recognizable type on the New York Scene in the years leading up to and immediately following World War II. A bald, diminutive, bespectacled, owlish-looking aesthete in a bow tie, he is seen in one image surrounded by his sundry treasures. Not only are various icons of the Modern movement on view in the photograph, but one also sees those works of tribal Africa and of other cultures that were the requisite visual furniture of anyone presuming to “advanced” taste some 70 years ago.

Though far smaller in scale than the humongous Ambroise Vollard exhibition last year at the Met, and of similar proportions to the Hilla Rebay show at the Guggenheim, this new exhibition, curated by Karole Vail, reflects the preoccupations of the most recent scholarship and represents the emergence of a new interest in matters peripheral to the art object itself. Instead it focuses attention on dealers, curators, and collectors. In previous generations, when the art world was much smaller, such shows would have seemed too marginal to merit anyone’s attention. But today, with the almost unseemly pullulation of art majors, art historians, would-be collectors, and dealers, it is a fair guess that people will zealously flock to shows of this sort.

And then, of course, there are the works of art themselves. The show is not quite as thrilling as it might otherwise be — at least to frequent visitors to the museum — since many of the works are shown fairly regularly and have merely been reshuffled. But that is hardly the case for all of them, and it will be of considerable interest to many art lovers to learn through which conduit the Guggenheim acquired such multitudinous Kandinskys, Kokoschkas, and Klees.

Did Nierendorf have a good eye? That is hard to say, not because of what is displayed in the Guggenheim show, but because of our ignorance of what is left out. Certainly some excellent and pre-eminent works of early Modernism passed through the hands of Karl Nierendorf. Even as regards upstart abstract artists of the New York School, such as Al Gottlieb, the European dealer appears to have chosen wisely. And yet, other works, not on display, but reproduced in several catalogs that Nierendorf wrote (these catalogs are on view), suggest that he had less assurance when it came to mid-century representational art. However that may be, there are very few false steps in the splendid works displayed at the Guggenheim, even if one suspects that the curators of today may have stacked the deck.