During his 40-year career, Detroit native James Lee Byars (1932-97) created a varied body of work that fused elements of minimalism, conceptualism, and performance with an Eastern sensibility developed during his formative years as an artist in Japan. Byars is generally viewed as an important though peripheral figure of the 1960s and ’70s art scene, but recent years have witnessed a posthumous resurgence of interest in his work.

A 2004 exhibition at the Whitney examined his influence on recent American art. Now the most comprehensive look at his oeuvre ever shown in the United States fills six gallery spaces in Chelsea, Midtown, and the Upper East Side.

Although this scattered show lacks the coherence of a museum retrospective, it gives a good sense of the impressive range of Byars’s work. Here are early Japanese ink drawings of the late 1950s and early ’60s, performance works of the 1970s, and large-scale sculptures of the 1980s and ’90s.

Byars’s gigantic, 16-star, four-stripe version of the American flag, a prop in his 1974 movie “Two Presidents,” cascades down a wall and spills onto the floor of one of Perry Rubenstein’s 24th Street spaces. Next to the flag is an empty pedestal meant to serve as the stage for a performance piece titled “The Perfect Kiss” (1978). Re-enacted every day at noon throughout the duration of the show, this performance lasts no longer than a moment: A gallery attendant or a visitor who volunteers steps onto the pedestal, briefly puckers his lips, and then steps down. As Byars envisioned it, the perfect kiss is uncomplicated, sensual, and fleeting.

This evanescent gesture encapsulates the qualities that make Byars’s work so compelling: ephemerality, immateriality, intimacy, humor, and humility. Unfortunately, these very qualities also explain why this exhibition, though it may win Byars new fans,is unlikely to recast him as a central figure of the 1960s and ’70s avant-garde. Charm and accessibility have never ranked high among the qualities that determine artistic reputation, and this is doubly true of the austere, enigmatic movements associated with this artist.

Unlike his brasher, more celebrated contemporaries, Byars’s humility was readily apparent at the start of his career, when he lived primarily in Japan. In a sculpted self-portrait from 1959, on display at Perry Rubenstein’s 23rd Street space,he portrayed himself in the most relaxed of poses: seated with his back against the wall and his legs stretched along the floor. Made of wood and paper, this humorous, self-deprecating figure has a tiny head, a weathered body, spindly legs, and big block feet.

In later works, Byars employed smooth, opulent materials such as gold leaf, marble, silk, and jade, and took on grand themes – the sun, the moon, prophesy,death – but his art remained largely free of pretension. “Concave Figure” (1994), on display at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, presents a row of five columns that curve like open parentheses. Though made of marble, each column seems pliable, sensitive to the lightest touch.The work responds to the diverse wishes of its audience, offering the comforts of both companionship and solitude. Its columns stand a humanlike 6 feet in height, and together could constitute a small party; yet the columns are separated by regular 5-foot intervals, and the piece resembles a labyrinthine space that invites quiet contemplation.

To understand why Byars’s welcoming, soft-edged work is not better known, one needs only to walk a few steps down West 24th Street, where the Gagosian Gallery is showing Richard Serra’s latest steel sculptures. Monumental in scale, severe in form, and designed to amaze, the work of Mr.Serra is everything Byars’s is not. For several decades, Mr. Serra has created gigantic sculptures that, among other things, pronounce the Vulcan-like power of their artist-creator. Byars’s work leaves the viewer with opposite impressions: One either forgets that these pieces were created at all or recognizes in them the imperfect touch of an ordinary man.

Like the earlier Whitney exhibition, this multipart show is evidence that the recent flush of curatorial interest in the advanced art of the 1960s and ’70s has yet to subside. Cynics may also suspect that another motivation for the exhibition is the gallerists’ desire to stimulate a new market for Byars’s work. Either way, the artist will not become a star of art history books or auction houses anytime soon, but instead will remain a relatively obscure, privately admired figure.

Perhaps this is why Klaus Ottmann, the independent curator who organized this pleasing show, titled it “The Rest Is Silence,” recalling Hamlet’s final dying words. Like Shakespeare’s beloved character, Byars was a quirky, charming prince whose unfortunate fate was never to be king.

Until June 24 at Michael Werner (4 E. 77th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-988-1623), Mary Boone (541 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues & 745 Fifth Avenue, 212-752-2929), and Perry Rubenstein (527 W. 23rd Street, 526 W. 24th Street, and 534 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-627-8000).