Today’s global art scene, with its dizzying cross-influences, almost makes one nostalgic for simpler times — for when, say, Abstract Expressionism symbolized the triumph of American frankness over French refinement. Of course, real-life revolutions are never really quite that tidy. Two current exhibitions on 57th Street remind us of the many ways that mid-century American artists were nurtured by the examples of the French School.

The five interwar American Modernists at Babcock Galleries — Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler — all felt the lure of Paris in their youths and made the requisite pilgrimage to France. The several works at Babcock by each of these artists are surprisingly varied, in most cases ranging from early pieces derivative of French models to later ones of considerable originality.

Davis’s rather tame 1922 still life could be a tribute to Picasso or Braque, but alongside it a compact ink and graphite drawing from c. 1932 boldly captures the kaleidoscopic sensations of urban life: signs, railings, the reflections in storefront windows. Similarly, while Hartley’s drawings of a landscape and a still life are clearly derivative of Cézanne, his undated pastel “Woman Standing” shows a poignant mixture of muscularity and tenderness.

In Dove’s gouache and watercolor “Centerport Series #9” (1941), pale blues and tart greens and yellows sport about a fanciful but utterly convincing landscape. Marin’s elemental watercolor landscape from 1910 consists of no more than a few unmodulated planes of color. Next to it hangs his 1953 graphite drawing “New York Series, A,” a dark nest of scribbles that, before one’s eyes, sorts itself into a jostle of buildings, signs, and tiny pedestrians. Sheeler’s large “San Francisco (Fisherman’s Wharf )” (1956) layers two images of a ship’s prow in a colorful, hard-edge version of Cubism. And most unexpected of all is his tiny 1959 painting on Plexiglas, in which feathered brushstrokes lend a wonderfully tactile atmosphere to a portrait of a barn.

Katharina Rich Perlow’s miniretrospective presents the intriguing story of another American, this one a contemporary of Pollock and de Kooning. During his lifetime, John Ferren (1905–70) seemed perpetually in the thick of things. He met Picasso, Miró, and Mondrian in France, where he lived for several years and matured as a painter. He joined Abstraction-Création and later the American Abstract Artists, and was also one of the founders and briefly the president of the club, the downtown forum for New York School artists.

Posterity, however, has awarded Ferren a more peripheral status. This is a shame, because the nearly 30 works at Perlow, covering a startling evolution of styles, reflect a thoroughly original temperament.

Two early Fauve landscapes reminiscent of Maurer reflect Ferren’s early mastery of color. There follows a series of abstractions with robust hues and biomorphic shapes, among them “St. Tropez” (1931), in which a phalanx of deep blue-greens barely contain a buoyant swath of terra-cotta-pink. Is it a face? Possibly: A peculiar, palette-shaped yellow could be a stand-in for an eye, but in any event the rhythmic shapes, by turns gathering, holding, and easing, impart to it a compelling presence.

In the mid-’30s, Ferren experimented with a technique of imprinting the designs from engraved plates onto plaster surfaces, which he then elaborated with additional marks and carving. In one such piece, “Composition” (1936), delicate lines race about a geometric design, sweeping through broad areas of the raw plaster and condensing in radiating networks. At strategic points, neat gouges in the surface accelerate the precise, freewheeling rhythms. In this remarkable piece — part drawing, part painting, part sculpture — the vitality of line finds an evocatively contrasting home in rich austerity of the plaster plane.

Such works established Ferren’s reputation in America, but he soon changed course. After a brief return to figuration, represented here by an Hélion-esque composition from 1947, he reverted once more to abstraction with such paintings as “Jeu d’Esprit” (1952), in which brightly hued calligraphic marks float on white or colored backgrounds. By the late ’50s, these had evolved into compositions of thick, massings of strokes on flat shapes that echoed the canvas edges. With their blocked-in areas of turbulent textures, several such canvases suggest a kinship with Hans Hofmann, though Ferren’s colors and brushwork seem decidedly more upbeat. Trips to the Middle East and India inspired his final “Mandala” series, represented here by two small, symmetrical 1968 abstractions with vertical bands of glowing color.

In some respects, Ferren was clearly out of step with his American peers. One senses that for this cosmopolitan painter, composing and gesturing were discrete acts instead of seamless catharsis. His work shows a philosophical scrupulousness that spanned the decades, resisting both the 1950s demand for demonstrations of passion and the 1960s for dispassionate cool. These are the qualities, however, of an independent spirit, and Perlow’s installation suggests his status in the art world is due for serious upgrade.

Davis, Dove until June 29 (724 Fifth Ave., between 56th and 57th streets, 212-767-1852);

Ferren until June 2 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-644-7171).