When people think of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner today, it is usually in the context of his early work from the beginning of the 20th century. It was then, in 1905, that he founded Die Brücke, together with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl, and Erich Heckel. This was the movement that kicked off German Expressionism and was of crucial importance in developing the dazzling chromatic and compositional mayhem that Gauguin and then Matisse had introduced into the history of art a few years before. Kirchner (1880-1938) subsequently developed a more elongated, shrill, and anguished manner of painting, which produced those Berlin street scenes of pedestrians and prostitutes that were the focus of an exhibition last summer at the Neue Galerie.

At that point, with the onset of the 1920s, art history tends, politely but firmly, to take its leave of Kirchner. Surely this contentious and irascible artist continued to paint for nearly 20 years more, until his suicide in 1938. But by then he was producing little that critics or historians have felt it necessary to dwell upon. Like many other early Modernists who hit their strides early in life, Kirchner was destined to survive his artistic relevance by nearly a generation.

To countermand that critical neglect, Michael Werner Gallery has just inaugurated an exhibition devoted to Kirchner’s late works. These paintings show continuity with, as well as marked differences from, what went before. Although they are not as good as what preceded them, the question for criticism is whether they are worthy of posthumous attention.

The late work of an important artist, one who distinguished himself in youth through his skill, power, and originality, is apt to resemble a dream that has essentially ended, even though the sleeper remains dormant as the strands of reverie slowly and laboriously dissipate. In Kirchner’s early work from his 20s, and especially in the rather different Berlin street scenes from his 40s, you cannot ignore the authority of his strenuous inventions. Art history had found in him one of its necessary vessels, and as such he commands our attention and respect.

There are few skills of color, composition, or draftsmanship that were present in Kirchner’s earlier works and that are absent in his latest works. The gleaming greens, yellows, and reds that make up the head of Frau Albert Müller recall his best work of a generation earlier. There is a similar chromatic blast in the yellows and greens that make up “Man Walking on the Green Ground” (1928). But the secret to his art was always a kind of ad hoc, reflexive spontaneity that allowed him to sail through the first two decades of his career, and that gift seems to have largely deserted him in the works on view at Michael Werner. These paintings are often good, but they do not crackle with that sense of consequence they once had. There are false steps, as there always were in his rough and ready art, but sometimes they slips into banality, rather than, as before, into the sort of anarchy that — among artists, at least — carries its own conviction.

Living in Switzerland in his later years, Kirchner viewed the art world from a distance, and he struggled to keep up with it. Influenced by Picasso and the later Matisse above all, his figures lose their spiked and ragged power, yielding to a winsome legato. Though it is not at all clear that the irascible Kirchner was any happier in this period of his life, his paintings take on an air of general quiescence, while the contours of the forms assume a smoothness. Above all, the artistic and spiritual aspirations of these paintings recall the forms that populated the Spaniard paintings starting in the 1920s. Hands are raised in the air, as in “Naked Women in the Woods” (1928) to form hieratic gestures of what was once an impressive and marketable universality.

At the same time, however, Kirchner has no use, perhaps no understanding, for Synthetic Cubism. He chooses a few motives that serve his purpose, but he can abandon the spirit of the movement even within the same painting, as is evident in his “Night Scene with Lit Figures” (1935), in which abstracted forms, glowing in the electric intensity of a yellow light, quiver across the canvas.

Even so, some of these paintings exhibit considerable charm and occasional skill. But they cannot rival the early work that is the pillar of his fame.

Until June 14 (4 E. 77th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-988-1623).