If Jules Olitski’s career were a sandwich, then his current show at Knoedler & Company, which presents very early and very recent work, would at first seem like the bread without the meat.

Mr. Olitski was one of the giants of the post-painterly abstraction of the 1960s, when he famously took to working with a spray gun to achieve ethereal color sensations and a hands-free look. In his classic canvases it seemed as if the pigment were somehow breathed onto the surface rather than applied manually. He also experimented with staining, along with peers among the “second generation” New York School painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. For these artists, cool delivery and crisp chroma were a studied contrast to the existential antics of their predecessors, Pollock and de Kooning.

In the 1950s, before turning to his purist staining and spraying strategies, Olitski had taken to their polar opposite, laying on paint and other substances in bravura feats of impasto. Knoedler is presenting half a dozen pieces from the 1950s which almost read like sculptural reliefs, as well as 11 recent works that are thick with painterly texture. The selection suggests a surprising degree of unity for so reckless an eclectic when it comes to texture and color.

This isn’t to say his 1950s images segue into those of the last few years without a jolt. The earlier works look to be period pieces that could almost be refugees from a Paris abstract salon – they have the leaden angst of the piled up paint of Jean Dubuffet, Nicolas de Stael, or Serge Poliakoff – whereas the recent works are unmistakably from the hand of an American master. They have formal clarity, emotional clout, and coloristic elan. But the development looks logical and consistent enough in a way that’s amusing if you know what actually came between.

Mr. Olitski was famously Clement Greenberg’s favorite, and much of the critical writing that surrounds the painter dwells on his relationship to Cubism. Carl Belz, for instance, argues in Knoedler’s catalog that Mr. Olitski’s penchant for blacks and earthy browns in these early canvases connects him to the palette of analytical Cubism. But if you were to step into this show unversed in such theory or in Mr. Olitski’s vaporous abstraction of the 1960s, the overriding impression would be one of romanticism. “The Holy Virgin” (1959) is a pulsating symphony of fiery reds and purples to put you in mind of Turner or Delacroix – or the English expressionist David Bomberg’s late biblical subjects of the postwar period.

To achieve “body” in his early impasto, Mr. Olitski took to using Spackle. This gives awesome weight to his paint. Knock on the canvases (not that we’re recommending it, but on my visit the president of the gallery did so for my edification), and they resound like wood. You don’t need to accost them to learn this, however, as the surfaces are gruesomely lethargic. In theory, the laid-on pinks and whites of “Painting I” (1958), which recalls Philip Guston, should have fleshly connotations, but the arrested pigment is as still as the grave.

Jump forward nearly half a century, and the effect of Mr. Olitski’s impasto is very different: The surfaces bubble with color and succulence. Still, the octogenarian retains his brazen indifference to “safe taste,” to borrow a phrase from Greenberg, when it comes to painterly texture and chromatic effect. His applications, whether on canvas or retina, invariably risk grossness.

The latest works actually mix sensations of the ethereal and the earthy in ways that are remarkably satisfying, a happy mix of protein and starch. In “Paradisio” (2004) the agitations of the brush have become fleshy, like late Picasso, in a way that eluded Mr. Olitski’s 1950s works. He has taken to dripping luridly colored borders around his im ages, in this case opting for turquoise in a gesture that recalls both Pollock and the semen motif in Edvard Munch. Formally, the drip-frame grounds what would otherwise, for all its exploding flesh quality, be an intimation of cataclysmically deep space.

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Younger than Mr. Olitski by a generation, Melissa Meyer is nonetheless an artist whose ambitions and terms of reference are steeped in 1960s Color Field Painting. She too represents a mixed marriage (or the progeny of one) of American gesture and French color.

Her own language owes more to Ms. Frankenthaler than to Mr. Olitski, but she draws in equal measure from Pollock, Matisse, and Japanese prints. It comes as no surprise to anyone exposed to her at once gutsy and ethereal images to learn that her handling of oils moved forward exponentially when she began to experiment in watercolor. Her fast, sumptuous, high-octane swirls and spills of diaphanous color are exhilarating essays in the potential of pigment to convey sensations of depth and space.

In works like “Garden at Villa Orbiana 1” (2005), whose title signals a happy sojourn in an Italian residency, there is a boisterous but good-natured joust between open linear swirls and solid forms. In this new group of paintings, Ms. Meyer is beginning to give her hand the freedom to generate purposeful though abstract signs, which tease the eye with figural possibilities. Jugs and faces loom among the blocked-out forms, while the lattice-like calligraphs put me in mind of the joyful contortions of Matisse’s cutout blue nudes.

Olitski until November 5 (19 E. 70th Street, at Madison Avenue, 212-794-0550). The gallery declined to disclose its prices.

Meyer until October 8 (529 W. 20th Street #6B, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666). Prices: $5,500-$28,000.