It tells you a lot about the art and personality of Marvin Israel that he had a dog named Marvin. Described as a cross of the 50 meanest breeds, it is said to have been named so that his owner “could yell at himself all day.”

Israel, a polymath, impresario, and educator, was the legendary “last great art director in the fashion world,” as writer Larry Shainberg put it in photographer Neil Selkirk’s touching and informative 2005 documentary, “Who Is Marvin Israel?” He brought Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Bill Brandt, and Walker Evans’s subway photographs to a mass audience through startling spreads in Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960s.

But like his counterpart at Conde Nast, Alexander Liberman, with whom he will inevitably be compared, Israel’s first training and sustained vocation was as a fine artist. His early style fused Surrealism and Pop in garish colors and materials, and favored collage, but he found his form as an existentialist animalier in the tradition of Goya and Francis Bacon. Cheim & Read is showing a suitably moody exhibition of these quirky, harrowing, somber works, many depicting animals in human poses hanging (or hanged) in darkened rooms. The “Black Paintings” (named, like Goya’s, for their humor rather than their hue) are on display in Cheim & Read’s funerary chapellike vaulted project space.

Among the landmark photography exhibitions Israel curated and installed, one for the animal photographer Peter Beard seems strikingly redolent of his own work: He plunged the exhibition space into darkness, picking out the images, some of which were placed underfoot in intense pools of light. A favored motif has panes of light shining on a fragment of animal and wall. In view of his day job, it is hard not to see the cropped shapes against shades of gray in camera terms.

The notoriously grouchy Israel is described by Mr. Shainberg as a man who wasn’t afraid of his anger. But what comes across from these bizarre, sadistic images is less anger than a contained – if not resigned – meditation on pain and absurdity. Dogs, pigs, and donkeys lynched and trussed, or else hung upside down from a single paw, form macabre mobiles of torture. This collision of aesthetic value and mean imagery relates closely to some of the photographers Israel championed, especially Arbus.

But for all the death and pain involved, these images are ciphers of victimhood in much the way that Leon Golub’s thugs and torturers are of oppression. The eye quickly reconciles, emotionally, to the somber palette, and discovers rich layers of modulated tone in Israel’s charcoal and pastels. While he can play the drama of light to Old Masterly effect, his treatment is closer to grisaille than chiarascuro – that is to say, more about complementaries than contrasts.

In images that are at once illustrational and visceral, Israel struck a balance between caricature and observation, invention and realism that puts you in mind of contemporary artists ranging from Paula Rego to William Kentridge. Though his flesh and fur is highly mannered, his animals nonetheless feel “right,” both in themselves and their placement in space.

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Anne Dunn is an artist of markedly different temper than Marvin Israel, but these painters have in common the fact of choosing to work in seemingly conservative styles while in other aspects of their lives championing the avant-garde. Ms. Dunn, together with John Ashbery, Sonia Orwell, and her husband Rodrigo Moynihan, was a founder-publisher of the Paris-based journal Art and Literature, an important conduit for painters and poets in the 1960s. A small display of Ms. Dunn’s still lifes at Tibor de Nagy complements the gallery’s exhibition of drawings by her mentor, Jean Helion, which is fitting as Ms. Dunn played a vital, behind-the-scenes role in bringing the current Helion retrospective to the National Academy.

Ms. Dunn pays homage to the French master in her affection for pumpkins, but her treatment of the vegetable contrasts with his. On the one hand, she is more the perceptualist, teasing out minutely observed detail, dwelling lovingly on the pumpkin’s interstices. Yet with a palette that’s ethereal and otherworldly, and tapering vegetal and floral forms that are stylized and effete, Ms. Dunn is more romantic and old-fashioned than Helion, something of a latterday symbolist.

While Helion, like Magritte or de Chirico, would make a painting or drawing of a common object that has the Modernist sense of being a sign of itself, he also imbued his things with a solid, prosaic sense of visual fact. Ms. Dunn, by comparison, submits her greater accumulation of detail to a washy, swirling gestalt with a poetic, exalted sense of space, touch, and color.

Marvin Israel until September 2 at Cheim & Read (547 W. 25th Street, between Tenth Avenue and West Street, 212-242-7727).

Anne Dunn until August 12 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (724 Fifth Avenue at 56th Street, 212-262-5050).