In contemporary art, the interest in drawing has surged in recent years, and with it the notion of what exactly constitutes a drawing has evolved as artists challenge previous conceptions with new work. This week two shows opened – on the same street, in fact, and only for a week or so – that invite us to compare older drawings with more recent examples. It is interesting to note, too, that in each case, the New York gallery presenting the work has partnered with a London gallery for its show.

“Old Master drawings can be shown very successfully with later drawings,” writes Flavia Ormond, of London’s Flavia Ormond Fine Arts, in the catalog for “Master Drawings.” “They complement each other as modern drawings grow out of the Old Master tradition.” By “modern,” Ormond means any sheet produced between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the 20th century. Thus the 33 works on view at Adelson range from a finely rendered red chalk “Mother and Child” (c. 1526), by Michelangelo Anselmi, to George Bellows’s distinctly more pedestrian charcoal drawing “Belgian Women” (c. 1920).

Although it does not detract at all from the quality of the wide-ranging selection, the Adelson show is less “curated” than organized. “Correspondences: Drawings Past and Present” at Michael Werner (who collaborated with Colnaghi London for this show), on the other hand, is a thoroughly curated exhibition that pairs old – and in some cases Old Master – drawings with contemporary efforts.

What, we are led to ask, can we learn about a 19th-century portrait drawing by Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905) when it is hung next to Arnulf Rainer’s “Self-portrait With Fur Hat” of 1964? Or, for that matter, what does the Menzel teach us about the Rainer? In this instance, the coupling indicates, among other things, just how much the last 140 years or so has expanded our sense of what a drawing is.

A proto-Realist and an exceptional draftsman, Menzel produced in “A Man in Profile Seen From Above” an affecting portrait of a bearded and balding individual with a prominent nose. The man was likely not an acquaintance of the artist but someone he saw in a restaurant or on the street, and the drawing evinces careful observation. The Austrian Rainer’s self-portrait, influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut, consists of a scribbly mass of black crayon centered on a sheet.

Each man was concerned with the expressive qualities of the marks they made. Menzel, however, aimed to reproduce as faithfully as possible the experience of looking at an individual, while Rainer set out to create an abstract equivalent of his emotional or psychological state of mind. What is crucial is that each man accomplished his ends through purely abstract strokes and smudges: One arrived at naturalism, the other let his marks remain abstract.

Between naturalism and pure abstraction a large gulf of intentions opens. Yet what happens when we consider two figurative artists, particularly when their lives are separated by centuries? Take, for example, the pen-and-brown-ink “Five Standing Oriental Men” (c. 1530) by Pseudo-Pacchia, which one finds next to the contemporary artist Peter Doig’s oil on-paper “Guest House 3” (2002).

As one might expect, in the Pseudo-Pacchia every line serves to describe some detail – the fold of a turban, the flow of a beard – as precisely and ideally as the artist could manage. Doig’s oil sketch – a blurry picture of a man in black clothes with a red collar, standing next to a mustachioed man in a top hat whose torso dissolves in watery yellow and green pigments – doesn’t pant after details, even though it seems to have been painted from an old photograph.

Both are lovely drawings, and one doesn’t need to choose between them. Indeed, the fulfilling pleasure of the Werner show is how the confrontation across centuries can blast comfortable assumptions about artistic achievement. Does the apparently simpler Doig sketch instill less pleasure or convey less information than the highly detailed Pseudo-Pacchia? Not for me. The two artists merely have different goals.

Menzel also figures prominently in the Adelson show. It, too, boasts a portrait of a man, only here it is accompanied by a magnificent black chalk “View of Verona” (1881). As Ms. Ormond says, the drawings at Adelson all more or less partake of a single tradition. John Singer Sargent’s able, if precious, “Nude Boy Seen From Behind” (c.1874-8), an early life study, does not seem out of place in the same room as Giorgio Vasari’s “A Seated Female Allegory of Military Virtue” – which, by the way, constitutes a new addition to the corpus of Vasari drawings. Both works aim to capture life and its forms as accurately as possible on a two-dimensional surface.

Still, “tradition” is a baggy word. I could discern almost as many shifts and swerves in the largely intact tradition represented at Adelson as at Werner. You might fix on the anti-descriptive energy – the modernity – of Theodore Gericault’s watercolor “The Bull Market” (1818-20); or muse on how strongly the somber, haunted “Moonlit Wooded Landscape” by Anthonie Waterloo (1609-90) differs from George Innes’s lighter, more optimistic, American sensibility in “Italian Doorway” (c.1871-4).

At Werner, so rich are the pairings that virtually any of them could form the basis for a dissertation; likewise, you could spend weeks teasing out the nuances of any one or two sheets at Adelson. Taken together, the two exhibitions remind us that, like dance, drawing is about personal movement, the way the hand travels over paper. Even the barest marks on a page show us something about the maker, and something about ourselves.

“Master Drawings” until February 11 (25 E. 77th Street at Madison Avenue, between 212-439-6800). Prices: $14,000-$225,000.

“Correspondences” until February 5 (4 E. 77th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-988-1623). Prices: $80,000-$150,000.