The late work of Philip Guston was axiomatic in the 1980s: it was a harbinger of the new “Bad” painting. Its goofy, almost insolent expressivity and gauche personalism, with its primitive appeal to graffiti and cartoons, almost defined the decade.

Somehow the influence has never gone away: Bad painting was just too much of a good thing. It could be that Guston’s importance to succeeding generations of painters had to do with his extreme, urgent expression of a perennial struggle (a kind of romantic-classic opposition) between the formal and the informal, the polite and the brash, felt by every creative painter worth his or her salt.

The winds of Gustonism gust through various Chelsea galleries right now. At Anton Kern, for instance, there is a young German painter named Bendix Harms whose self-portrait even resembles the errant Abstract Expressionist, his sad eyes and Picassoid distended nostrils captured within turned-up lapels. The head surmounts a pyramid of cushion-like forms each containing the word “moi” repeated in a childlike scrawl. There are shades of Louise Bourgeois and Francesco Clemente in the image, too.

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Richard Bosman is a natural carrier of the Guston gene: He studied with the master in the 1960s as a pioneer student at the New York Studio School. His other influential teacher there was Alex Katz, who included Mr. Bosman in a group show last summer at Colby College, Me.

Mr. Bosman can compete with Guston – or any artist – in terms of the depths of vulgarity he plumbs. His paintings are like oversized illustrations, shiny and brash. His

Americana borders on kitsch, but there’s an energetic ambiguity at play: Equal degrees of earnestness and satire animate his depictions of rural museums, Civil War enactments, historic monuments. He gives us a row of Shaker dresses, a vintage 19th-century forge, a barn full of collectibles, Herman Melville’s writing desk, cutout figurines of lumbermen.

But Mr. Bosman offers a very different experience of kitsch than, for instance, Jeff Koons, where smoothness and slickness underline machined banality (though, as if to tease out a comparison, his collectibles include toy lobsters like those favored by Mr. Koons.) Mr. Bosman’s paint handling is as ambiguous as his subject matter: The freshness and precision with which he paints wet in wet belies the allusions to painting-by-numbers in his style. The dresses, for instance, recall Wayne Thiebaud in the succulence of their delivery.

Initially so disconcerting, his paintings end up appealing precisely because of their parity of style and motif. His vulgarity has a perverse purism: His imagery, albeit illustrational, seems to derive from observation rather than appropriation (from photographs, say, or engravings). His images are vulgar in the edifying, original sense: plainspoken, in a common language.

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Carroll Dunham is looking more Gustonian than ever, though his new show at Barbara Gladstone is equally haunted by the shade of Picasso. This comes across in broadly delineated, dark scaffolds, filled in with brushy dabs of pink and blue, and with the sense of priapic figures disporting themselves by the sea.

Mr. Dunham revels in the fleshiness of pink – its exposed, sexed, puffed up tipsiness. His forms juggle penile and testicular associations with other body parts and facial features to build up an absurdist portrait of an Ubu Roi type – sometimes we get to see his top hat – luxuriating at the beach. The Guston-Picasso influences come across stronger than in previous shows, despite the fact that his earlier work had more of the gutsy impasto associated with the last, loose painterly splurges of those men. By comparison, these new images are thinned-out, aqueous.

Even though he only really hit the art world’s radar screen in the 1990s, Mr. Dunham remains a quintessential 1980s artist in terms of scale, speed, and subject: Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring must be counted as influences as strong as Picasso or Guston.

Mr. Dunham paints diptychs, presented here in overbearing frames, with halves differently oriented to emphasize spatial and compositional displacement. Some of the pairings read as the same forms from different perspectives. He pushes to an extreme, in this series of paintings, the oxymoronic, hard-edged messiness of his style, with definitive outlines playing off gratuitous splatter. He is masterful in his handling of these opposing qualities, and they are the key stage effect in his drama.

In the back room, Mr. Dunham displays a set of sculptures in laser cut steel on rather prissy coffee table-like pedestals. These are charming enough, at first, in their nursery exuberance. Seeing his forms in cool black metal and three dimensions, however, only serves to emphasize how little intrinsic value there is to his cartoonish vocabulary – a mere vehicle for something profounder and more satisfying in his painting. The whimsy and humor quickly wears thin in these sculptures, making them look like Tom Wesselman playing a joke at Antony Caro’s expense.