Contemporary art, when it touches at all upon artistic traditions, often resorts to a kind of commentary, exploring contexts rather than original spirit. The survey of drawings by Charles Cajori at David Findlay, however, refreshingly avoids such pitfalls. A lifetime of drawing the human figure has clearly put this second-generation Abstract Expressionist in touch with his own humanness. In 40 works spanning nearly half a century, Mr. Cajori’s resolve and insights express themselves in the most traditional of means: a formal language of lines and tones.

Produced in a variety of media, including pencil, charcoal, and ink, the drawings lie stylistically somewhere between the full-bodied abbreviations of Matisse and the whipsaw tautness of de Kooning’s work around 1950. But more to the point, Mr. Cajori’s work reflects the same curiosity about the way forms fill and divide a rectangular arena. In short, he composes — that old-fashioned concept! — in pursuit of his subjects’ deeper characters.

“Untitled (57XL-652)” (1958), one of the earlier drawings here, is remarkable for rich charcoal tones that cohere as a muscular but momentarily unidentifiable mass. One quickly detects two seated figures, though, and their forms make instant, vigorous sense of multiple plastic impulses. As with Matisse and de Kooning, humble marks make for complex possibilities.

Later drawings are more austere in their angular lines and reductive tones, but here, too, Mr. Cajori locates forms with feeling and precision. “Untitled (63L-041)” (1963), for instance, evokes the extreme foreshortening of a model’s torso with a few deft arcs of belly, rib cage, and shoulders. Just beyond, a sweeping curve of pillow resolutely contains her plunge into the drawing’s depths. This gambit — a single line anchoring an entire scene — appears time and again in other drawings, with floor lines or platform edges fleshing out whole environments. Often such lines locate pairs of models, their parallel, contrasting developments heightened by angling limbs.

The greatest surprises of the exhibition are two energetic drawings of flowers from the early 1990s. While more anxious in execution than similar efforts by Ellsworth Kelly, they are also more evocative of enveloping air. Alongside, three landscapes from the early ’70s admirably catch the disposition of rocky masses and the vertical oppositions of trees. Their shapes read as both flat planes and profound movements in space.

Pacing the exhibition are several paintings, their colors adding a suggestive light, if not always urgency, to their boldly drawn structures. Visitors may find themselves turning more often to a wall of recent figure drawings, all produced since 1995, and ample evidence of the artist’s unflagging engagement with his motif. Modest and at times even inelegant in technique, they beautifully find the grace of an arcing spine, an extended leg, and arms crossed about a knee.

Until September 27 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-486-7660).