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Imagine the Museum of Modern Art without The Starry Night. Now imagine what it would have become without its founding director, Alfred H. Barr.

Not easy, is it? At one point, a turning point, as the museum approached its landmark opening in 1929, the two were at odds, and just try to guess who won. The outcome brought the museum that much closer to a canon for modern art, thanks in no small part to Lillie P. Bliss. Now MoMA gives her and her collection their due, to put its finger on what was at stake, through March 29.

Few exhibitions rewrite history, although more than a few try. With just forty works from the Lillie P. Bliss collection, the Modern rewrites its own history. Generations, me included, have learned how a young professor at Wellesley College gave modern art a defining history, one that lasted the rest of the century—and, to its credit, one that MoMA itself has worked hard for a while now to revise. Barr created a canon that started in Paris and found its fulfillment in New York, on the cutting edge of the present every step of the way. That is why he planned the new museum’s opening show on Fifth Avenue to stick to then contemporary American art. It took just three women to shoot it down.

As MoMA tells it, Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan were its true founders—with the indulgence at most of John D. Rockefeller himself. The three got the idea and contributed its core. Sick and tired of the crowds in front of The Starry Night, which is not even modern? Now you can see it much as it once stood in a private collection. Bliss also allowed her work to be sold to fund new acquisitions, a museum no-no today, but that helped pay for such stalwarts as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, as well. (That work still hangs in the main galleries.)

The founders saw a growing interest in the art that had shocked New York in the 1913 Armory Show, where Bliss first publicly exhibited her collection. She showed again at the Met, but she was not a precocious or instinctive collector. She met Arthur B. Davies, a painter of nudes and landscapes, and John Quinn, among the first collectors of modern art. Both had her looking back to the last century, with the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. She collected Georges Seurat as well—like the precision of Seurat drawings in Conté crayon in black. She found a new freedom, though, well into her fifties, with the death of her mother, who had needed no end of care.

And that freedom had her looking to the present—and to a future museum for modern art. I, for one, could easily leave The Starry Night to Vincent van Gogh on loan a year back to the Met. I could not imagine the Museum of Modern Art, though, without Paul Cézanne. No one else so embodies a vision of modern art as rigorous but constantly probing, even as the artist all but despairs of finding completion. And that vision was Barr’s. Still, Bliss collected work spanning Cézanne’s career, including Uncle Antoine, Pines and Rocks, Still Life with Apples, and the large Bather.

I still marvel at how his uncle plays the artist himself, how firm the bather seems, and yet how evanescent he is as well. I still marvel at how the weave of a forest both invites and defers the sun. I still marvel, too, at how the pattern on a cloth seems to tumble out onto a table with the already unstable apples. Bliss had caught onto something, and Barr must have been a welcome discovery as well. Still, she and her co-founders had to object when his planned opening show excluded Europe. Maybe her relative conservatism was at play, too, in starting with Post-Impressionism, but not altogether. Still, the women did not have to threaten a veto to change Barr’s mind, for he knew all along just how much lay at stake.

The show will never be “major,” and work will return to galleries for the museum’s collection when it is done. It includes letters, a telegram, newspapers, and the guest book from the museum’s opening for those who want to rewrite history for themselves. To the end, though, Bliss was still helping the museum keep up with its times. She bought Paul Gauguin woodcuts and a grandly flat portrait by Amedeo Modigliani. She bought Picasso’s Woman in White and the view out a window by Henri Matisse with an empty violin case and sunlight’s silent music. She died in 1931, never to see MoMA in its own building just blocks away from its first home, the one she knew.

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After drip paintings came stained canvas, from postwar artists who could leave more to nature and nothing to chance. So what comes now? How about color carried to your eye by the wind and by paint?

Violeta Maya returns to the materials, imagery, and style of the late 1950s, with acrylic, raw pigment, and plenty of canvas to let them breathe. This is nothing but painting, in a tradition where abstraction is just that, just as for Susan English in Chelsea. It is also much of her best work, lbut she took me most by surprise with canvas hanging freely from four wooden arches and, every so often, billowing upward.

When it comes down to it, nothing really separates Abstract Expressionism from color-field painting except, perhaps, a heading in a textbook. Drips, stains, targets, or slashes, it was all gestural abstraction in postwar art, where only the gestures had changed and not so very much at that. It was, if anything, just a matter of temperament, as the delicacy and violence of flung paint gave way to the lushness of poured paint. One could almost call it a matter of male and female temperament, of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning joined by Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. One could, that is, had not galleries begun to rediscover such women artists as Michael West (Corrine in real life). As for the richness of poured paint, with color as a target, field, or veil, it all but belonged to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Maya risks a return to not exactly unfinished business, but fashionably close, at Nicelle Beauchene through February 15. Painting is no longer dead, they say, and anything goes, but “anything goes” can take art only so far. It does, though, allow a certain breathing room. Barely in her thirties, she works in Madrid, just as galleries have begun to see AbEx as an international movement, with a steady flow of artists back and forth between New York and Europe. She counts Japanese art as an influence, just when museums have looked again at Asian art and seen calligraphy. She sometimes works on multiple panels to stretch color further, and Chinese or Japanese art can unfold across several sheets of paper as well.

She takes her own claims lightly. As the show’s title has it, with an almost British reserve, “Me Atrevo a Decir que Esta Pintura Está Viva” (I dare say this painting is alive). A painting’s title takes her acknowledged pleasures under advisement, in English: Enjoy the Ride While You Can. The stains unfold horizontally, eaping across canvas or in counterpoint. The four hinged arches are physically attached, much as the panels are attached visually.

Their canvas, too, can leap only so far. If a breeze enters the gallery, it is a gentle one, and the fabric builds up around a point of rest on the floor. They and the wood approach sculpture, with its own imagery. They resemble mirrors, with their rounded top, a bit taller than a gallery-goer. Maya may look at her work and see just a bit more than herself. It is her Miedo a lo Desconocido, or fear of the unknown.

Speaking of a leap, my little history skips over a good third of the twentieth century. After gesture came Minimalism, before Postmodernism, in dialogue with it, or insistently itself. It also came with its own idea of late modern art. It spoke of art as object and image, line and color, space and light, the thing itself and the thing to be seen. One could subsume them all into contrasting elements of painting, edge and field. Susan English takes just that as her art, at Kathryn Markel also through February 15.

English translates the nearly invisible traces of the 1960s and 1970s, as in Agnes Martin, into pale, matte colors. They vary within a field, like the sky, and a horizon line is implicit, as is gesture, although landscape itself is not. This is as pure as abstraction gets, but it has plenty of excuses for line—the line surrounding a painting or separating its parts. She stresses it with contrasting colors and panels, where the viewer must determine which truly bounds a color field. She also paints in white along many an edge, just short of a frame. The quiet colors and stable borders give every reason to slow down.

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Does it matter where a work of art originated? Do we need to ask about the artist, the time, or the culture, or can we just appreciate the art? And if we do not appreciate the art for itself, have we betrayed it and, just as much, ourselves? Why should art not speak for itself?

I have pursued questions like these often over the more than twenty years of this Web site, along with my role as a critic. In fact, I doubt that I can match the more philosophical attempts in the past! The questions came up again, though, not so very long ago on Facebook. When I posted a link and brief reply, a second artist was even more skeptical. Suppose I rework my further comments, as a rather longer article and my latest upload in defense of not just looking. I shall combine my address to both, in the form of a letter to an unknown artist, maybe even you.

You raised the questions as both an admirer of art and an artist, so it is doubly real for you. You have heard friends speak of what they see in the patterns that they have made. As a savvy viewer who cannot see the same, you have to wonder whether that could ever matter to you. You may wonder whether your thoughts appear fully in your work as well. If not, you may wonder whether your work has taken on a new life, apart from you, or rather failed. It is, after all, a work of your imagination.

I have argued before why art takes words. It has to take words for me as a writer, and I have to hope that my words can open art to some others as well. In my earlier piece, I looked in particular at changing attributions. The Rembrandt committee had changed its mind about a painting in the Frick that so many of us have taken for granted as his. It has even shaped our personal understanding of Rembrandt. Since then, big money has backed novel attributions to Michelangelo at (gasp) age twelve (illustrated at left here) and, more recently, Leonardo da Vinci.

I still think that attributions matter, which is why arguments about millions of dollars for a supposed Leonardo get so heated. Allow me now, though, a fuller context for much the same questions—beyond attributions. I can start with your recent experience, on the way to that of others. Now, no question that an artist’s intentions cannot tell the whole story. Hard as it is to admit, an artist may even get it wrong. I am still attached enough to Modernism, New Criticism, and the like to think so.

Yet if the “intentional fallacy” means that it never matters how, where, and when a work of art began, then it is wrong. As Nelson Goodman, a philosopher of art, has said, he will believe that a painting speaks for itself when people start to admire poetry without reading the words. If you think that ugly painting is by Leonardo, you have to look for and indeed to see things that are simply not there. You have to see Leonardo and his other works differently, too, to their detriment. And then your questions may help you think freshly about those once again, to their betterment.

Think that you could not agree less with Goodman? I could understand that, but you may agree much more than you think, so let me tell you why. To me, it is just common sense. My answer will take several parts, so bear with me, but I shall try to stay more practical at the cost of serious theory than my previous effort. It involves the work and how the work comes to affect others. Pardon me, though, if it starts with you.

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