For more than two years, the Museum of Modern Art has been exiled to a reconditioned staple factory in Queens as a sleek new MOMA, budgeted at a gulp-inducing $858 million, rose conspicuously in Midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, out of sight in a shabby, windowless conference room in Queens, the curators of the painting and sculpture department have been playing with a scale model of the new galleries, debating how to retell the story of art in …showed first 75 words of 790 total…

…showed last 75 words of 790 total…fact that Cézanne based the painting on a photograph is also prophetic, for the interwoven relationship of painting and photography is central to modern art. Nor does it hurt that ''The Bather'' was donated by Lillie Bliss, one of the three wealthy New York women who founded MOMA and whose munificent bequest, with its requirement for the raising of an endowment fund, provoked the museum to inaugurate the permanent collection in 1931.