Despite name, “Tease” a most satisfying exhibition—a delicious display of drawings of the nude (or soon so to be) made in different centuries and with equally disparate intentions. Jointly presented by dealers Mireille Mosler and Jill Newhouse at Ms. Mosler’s gallery, the salon-style installation is an appropriately provocative aesthetic and thematic jumble, with saucy juxtapositions and suggestive formal links.

It opens with a pairing of pairings: “La toilette,” an undated drawing in lithographic pencil by the 19th-century Frenchman Henri Fantin-Latour, has a fair-skinned, voluptuous bather admiring herself in a mirror held up for her by a shadowy figure kneeling before her, his back to the viewer. Her pallid skin lights up the densely woven page. Next to it is a 2007 untitled work in the “death and the maiden” genre by Fumie Sasabuchi in pen and colored pencils in which there is a curious reversal of roles, with death clinging pathetically and longingly to the coyly smiling pinup girl primping herself at her vanity table.

As a bridge between these respectively gauchely colored and grayscale images is a piece from the Surrealist poet and collagist Georges Hugnet’s “Love life of the spumifères” series. It employs pink gouache on a vintage postcard to add ambiguous parasitic life to the woman’s gartered legs. From the outset, in other words, the curators set up little dialectics with playful syntheses and extrapolations.

“Tease” as often refers to the artist’s process as to his or her sitter’s state of dishevelment. The show puts forward an affinity between sexual allure and acts of drawing. There is a sense that the intimacy and exploratory nature of drawing is somehow akin to suggestive undressing. There are many different sensibilities of touch on display in this show, but with the possible exception of one or two German expressionists, these are drawings that avoid bold, defiant strokes in favor of delicate caressing marks, as if the artists are gently seducing their images into unveiling themselves.

A wonderful Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres sketch of the goddess of love rising from the sea, “Study for Venus Anadyomene” (1816), forms a triad with a mysterious mythological female figure by the Hungarian-born Rita Ackermann and a deviously kinky Hans Bellmer mannerist nude from around 1934. The way Bellmer’s figure is painted in delicate strokes of white gouache on black paper accentuates the sense she is emerging from the page of her own volition.

A pair of Fragonard drawings are major show-stoppers, and set a Rococo feel appropriate to the prevailing aesthetic of the show, which is generally one of gentle allure rather than blatant sexuality. They depict amorous adventures in idealized aristocratic settings. “L’armoire” feels like a phonetic pun on a piece of furniture whose name is so love-like: It shows a jealous husband who finds a bashful youth cowering in the closet. “Les Jets d’eau” (c. 1770) depicts water cannons spurting from under floorboards, at once disturbing and pleasing a group of sleepingwomenintheirboudoir. These cheeky images flank Matisse’s “Woman With Necklace” (1933), a relatively chaste pencil drawing perhaps eligible for the show for the come-hither smile and hint of cleavage that frame her flamboyant jewelry.

Matisse and Fragonard make for a suggestive coupling, helping us savor the formal substance of the 18th-century master unfairly dismissed for his frivolity while also relishing the erotic in the sometimesrepressed-seemingMatisse. Other juxtapositions in the show, however, seem gratuitous, such as the six tight, lurid photorealist adolescent nudes by the young German Martin Eder that sandwich a gorgeous drawing a of a sapphic scene by Klimt from around 1913.

Some of the figures in “Tease” are utterly self-absorbed, making voyeurs of artist and viewer alike, while others beckon brazenly in near pornographic sauciness. But many, as befits the title of the show, are in that wistful alluring halfway zone, occupying their own space yet potentially, at least, aware of someone’s gaze. That would be true, for instance, for the lithe, muscular resting male dancers who submit to the meticulous academic observation of Paul Cadmus in his large undated pastel, “Two Dancers with Bentwood Chairs.” It would have been true, too, of almost any work by Don Doe from his recent show at this gallery, but his “Strip Tease” (2007) loses any sense of ambiguity, with way more strip than tease to it, alas. It is to be found, however, in Pierre Bonnard’s little, sanguine “Nude at her Toilet” (1910) or Balthus’s langorous “Nude stretched out with a voile” (1964). The Bonnard reverses the chiaroscuro of the Fantin-Latour to present the nude as a dark mass, caught contre-jour, her surroundings light in both senses — sparsely denoted and well illuminated.

The show is padded out a bit in places with asexual studio nudes, not that one is ever sorry to see a sketch by André Derain or Odilon Redon. Meanwhile, some works deal so overtly with sex as to be way beyond any sense of tease, such as a 1996 cartoon strip by R. Crumb illustrating a text by Charles Bukowski, and a storyboard by his wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb. But persevere to the gallery’s back room (Ms. Mosler’s imposing office with its suitably voluptuous oval desk) for some treats at the end of “Tease”: Marcel van Eeden’s photorealist, voyeuristic little pencil studies of stockinged feet and shoes from 2007 and a small sketch by Tom Wesselmann, “Drawing for Embossed Nude” (1968). His restrained yet loving hatchwork has a kind of breath-held expectation ironed out of the cool, resolved work for which this would have been preparatory.

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Another young contemporary artist who would have fitted neatly into “Tease” is Corinne Dolle (aka Coco), showing in the project room of Mary Ryan Gallery. The New York based French artist’s “Village Voice Pinup” (2007), in acrylic and spackle on canvas, presents a grid of two dozen portraits of prostitutes advertising in the New York free newspaper. These she depicts in the suggestive poses found in such ads, with their professional first names — Uma, Maria, Vivi, Chantal, et al.

In contrast to the grim colors of their newsprint source, Ms. Dolle has painted these in innocently brash, pop colors, while the lines are drawn in a naïve, tender hand. The other three works on display are cropped torsos of Victoria’s Secret models, carved in foam core mounted to canvas. These recall the carved reliefs of Stephan Balkenhol and the cutouts of Alex Katz.

Ms. Dolle achieves in these enigmatic works a mix of empathy and disdain, allure, and melancholy that is, rather like the artist’s own given and assumed names, a tease, indeed.

Tease until July 28 (35 E. 67th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-249-4195);

Dolle until August 3 (527 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-397-0669).