Abstract-Expressionism exemplified the courage and conviction of American art at mid-century, but by the late 1950s, resisting its ascendancy took another kind of bravery. Two current shows concentrate on the formative years of artists who bucked the trend to pursue representational painting.

Rosemarie Beck (1923–2003) enjoyed early success working in an Abstract Expressionist vein, but it left her unfulfilled. Her 10 paintings at Lori Bookstein show the intriguing progression of her work in the ’50s and ’60s, as it evolved toward the figurative, narrative-driven work of her later years.

Beck attended the Art Students League, but she may have learned more from her acquaintances with Bradley Walker Tomlin, Philip Guston, and Robert Motherwell. The paintings at Bookstein from the early 1950s show her in full expressionist swing, with close, contrasting strokes reminiscent of Guston’s contemporaneous work, but a fluid lyricism closer to Tomlin’s. Though possessing landscape-like depths, they map psychic, rather than physical, terrain.

“House of the Sun III” and “House of the Moon I” (both 1956) show the first hints of representation, with verticals and receding ground planes emerging from shimmering fields of ochre and yellow-gray strokes. The exhibition catalog notes a 1958 entry in her journal: “if my picture doesn’t relate to something outside art … after a while it ceases to prime, to temper the spirit.” In “House of Venus III” (1957), a loose grid of short, fluid strokes corresponds completely — if broadly — to the details of a tabletop with bottle, bowl, and teapot. These are vividly modeled, even as the fabric-like interweaving of brushstrokes asserts their flat outlines. Contradictions of perception abound: The table surface rises and settles about the objects according to the pressures of illumination, imparting a skyscraper intensity to the vertical of the bottle. In “Self-Portrait” (1958), the artist’s own hieratic likeness stares from behind a clutter of studio bric-a-brac, much of it unidentifiable but all conclusively holding in space.

In the following years, Beck’s colors became more varied, and her forms more distinctly defined. “Robert” (1965) is especially appealing — a fortuitous blending of careful method and eager observation. “Studio with Lovers” (1965–66), too, boasts lively rhythms, though its complex meshing of opaque forms shows the intellectualizing tendency — of both compositions and subjects — that would increasingly mark her work. To my eye, the mythological scenes of her later years sometimes show literary impulses overwhelming purely artistic ones, but the paintings now at Bookstein catch the artist at a poignant point, when the act of representing was itself a wonder.

The well-known landscapes of Neil Welliver (1929–2005) reflect his singular, probing tenacity. Six years ago, Alexandre Gallery exhibited early paintings of female nudes in streams that suggested another side of the artist: the quirky appetites lurking beneath his disciplined exterior. These playful qualities positively thrive in the gallery’s current installation of figure paintings and watercolors from an even earlier period of the artist’s life.

In “Amon’s Orchard” (1964), a man, dressed in a jacket and tie, and a young girl rest comfortably against a cow. “Royal Head” (1958–59) depicts a face with crazily enlarged jowls, while several self-portraits show natural proportions but brilliant Fauve colors. “Couple with Leslie” (1965), though, sets the most consistent tone of the installation, with an image of a man in a sport coat and tie, casually and inexplicably accompanied — á la Manet — by a naked woman.

In these oil paintings, Welliver’s color sometimes effectively supports his subject matter. The shadowy darks of foliage evocatively set off the paler figures in “Couple with Leslie,” and weighted hues lend a genuine eeriness to a small canvas from the early 1960s of a hand reaching above a row of flowers. In other oils, though, colors tend to be more forceful than eloquent, pressing relentlessly rather than shaping motifs with the give-and-take rhythms of Avery or Matisse.

The watercolors, though, are another matter. Oddly enough, their translucent hues tend to have more pictorial weight, characterizing the artist’s subjects with startling vigor. In the 1964 watercolor study for “Amon’s Orchard,” brown washes lend the cow considerably more heft than do the colors of the far larger canvas. Skin tones in the watercolors are not simply pink; they’re lasciviously buoyant against denser surrounding washes. In “Figures Under Tree” (1964), nudes lounge in rows, like a fisherman’s catch, before clothed men — and the image resonates, whether one sees it as calculated sexism or goofily misplaced desire.

Another watercolor from 1966 tenderly pictures a family of skeletons resting and bathing in a stream, redefining the term “skinny-dipping.” But this kind of humor dwindled as the artist concentrated on landscape after the mid-1970s. He may have found solace in nature after the series of tragedies that struck in 1975: the deaths of his wife and child, and the destruction of most of his lifework in a fire. His resolve remained, undiminished, but purged of the quirkiness of these beguiling works at Alexandre.

Beck until December 1 (37 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-750-0949).

Welliver until November 11 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-755-2828).