Merlin James’s painting “Flower Piece” (2001) is almost a manifesto of a will to evade categorization. At first it looks like a dashed-off, intimate still life of a few flowers in a vase – a subject that epitomizes slightness, ephemerality, and thanks to Manet, poignancy. But framing the composition are cautiously irregular rectangular strips of red, yellow, and blue that personify purist abstraction. The flowers flutter between epochs: This is a painting that simultaneously says “yes” and “no” to Modernism.

Everything Mr. James touches bristles with meaningful contradiction: You could say, for instance, that his work has dashed-off deliberation. That’s pretty much the hallmark of a show spanning 20 years of Mr. James’s work at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., his fourth with these dealers.

Typically of Mr. James, this looks like a one-man group exhibition. Not that he lacks consistent touch and attitude, but his images are provocatively all over the place in terms of reference, period, and genre. There are erotic nudes, turbulent seascapes, ruins, and interiors. Erudite nods to tradition and the Old Masters abound, but Mr. James doesn’t look in the least traditionalist. The paint is dry, pasty, sometimes murky acrylic; the palette is tortuously muted; the canvases are punched through with holes; and the surfaces are textured with alien materials like hair and sticks.

Mr. James’s is a difficult, high-minded art about art, yet the work has a quirky, whimsical personality. The paintings are “anxious objects” in the sense (coined by Harold Rosenberg) of being self-conscious about where they belong, critically and historically. But Mr. James doesn’t make official, “important” statements about art; instead, his images almost deliberately consign themselves to critical margins. The punctured and distressed pictures come “ready damaged,” and they also share something of the antipainting rhetoric of Luc Tuymans’s washed-out, one-sitting paintings after photographs.

Mr. James taps a similar ennui to Mr. Tuymans in “Room” (1990), a near-grisaille painted in sepia on white. The spare period interior depicts just a mirror, a stepladder, a lightbulb, and a sense of corridor spied through the open door. But Mr. James’s slightly naive handling and the hint of mystery of the open door give the work a poetic touch that rarely filters through Mr. Tuymans’s heavy-handed nihilism. “Room” looks like van Gogh’s room, only painted by Sickert in a drab, poignant tonalism and matter-of-fact touch.

Sickert is one of a number of figures about whom Mr. James has written criticism. Others include Morandi, Derain, William Nicholson, Gwen John, Soutine, Jean Helion, and – a rare contemporary – Alex Katz. What these disparate artists have in common is maverick status: At some crucial point in their careers they bucked the trend of avant-garde orthodoxy, only to embrace tradition in ways that retained the probing inventiveness of Modernism. Mr. James’s polemics identify a quasi-Masonic fraternity of painter’s painters. Judging by the exquisitely quirky paintings in this show, he is himself worthy of their ranks.

“Painting Per Se,” a lecture Mr. James gave as the first Alex Katz Chair in Painting at Cooper Union, and published by that institution in 2002, is a polemical plea against the fashionable blurring of boundaries that leaves painting stranded as just another option within the bigger category of visual art. The muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory), Mr. James notes, and each art form had its own muse: “There were already varieties – categories – at the very source of creativity,” he writes.The job of art, the ancients believed, was to commemorate, and to block the forgetting of eternal truths. “But also,” Mr. James writes, “I like to think that memory is the mother of the Muses because any form of creativity – any art form – requires a continual internalization of its own tradition, an ever-present consciousness of its past … Each painting contains the memory of painting.”

The survey at Sikkema Jenkins contains much memory of other paintings, both Mr. James’s own and those within the broad history of easel painting. The selection includes canvases on which he has worked for the whole period, like “Brown Girl” (1988-2003). The luminous figure against a lugubrious ground (which gives the picture its color name) has a doll-like quality that recalls the late portraits of another of Mr. James’s hero-mavericks, L.S. Lowry, the popular anti-academic painter most famous for industrial landscapes.

“Waves and Rocks” (2004-05), a sea painting that doffs its cap to Courbet and Constable, manages to show Mr. James both at his most diffident and most invested. It has the kind of intense blandness of de Chirico and “pittura metafisica” – apart from a few rocks and the hint of a vessel in the middle distance, it is depopulated – but the scumbling and impasto are atmospherically convincing and empathetic. At one and the same time, Mr. James seems to be making a dry, fusty painting of a painting of the sea, and to shiver as he paints it.

Until January 21 (530 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-2262).