Wayne Thiebaud — one of the great realist painters of the last half-century — has always kept faith with traditional genres.

Although it was exclusive to his early career, his most familiar activity is still life. Mere mention of his name will populate the mind’s eye with rows of near-identical cream cakes in correspondingly succulent impasto. Such imagery associated Mr. Thiebaud’s name with Pop art, thanks to the gentle irony with which he interpreted edible mass-production.

Second on his list, in terms of productivity and recognition, are landscape paintings, which have dominated his artistic maturity. These are modern-day caprices in synthetic colors that represent lush Californian valleys in aerial perspective, or fantastically steep San Francisco-style escarpments.

A third category, his figurative work, which is the subject of a survey at the Allan Stone Gallery, occupies a curious place within his oeuvre. While the figure has received serious attention throughout his career, the output has been relatively slight. Moreover, it has been the genre least invested with his idiosyncratic touch.

For sure, some eccentric chromatic decisions, and an attitude toward surface, single out the paintings as being from his hand. But — in spite of a sense of effortless command that generally permeates his work — the figure seems to have an exacting effect on Mr. Thiebaud. It seems the job of representing the human body is more bracing for this artist, as if grasping accuracy at close quarters results in more conventional marks than do his casual and perfunctorily dispatched still-life objects or long-distance, improvised vistas. In his figure works, he is less personal and more linked to tradition than in other genres.

This does not make his figuration “academic” in the pejorative sense of the word, although the artist himself has used that term to describe his very precise, restrained drawings from direct observation, often made in a group life-drawing environment, which feature prominently in this show. The show assembles six significant figure paintings of the 1960s and drawings and pastels from between that period and 1980. The pencil drawings are indeed classical, looking back to Ingres in their meticulous, ethereal rendering of the human form.

A dramatic contrast of planes in “Girl with Mirror” (1965) corresponds to a different sensibility for figures and objects. The painting shows a large-breasted nude, her hands clasped before her, with a hand mirror on a table before her that cuts her off at the waist (her hands would be below the table). The mirror has an almost schematic, illustration-book simplicity, captured in a few neat, deft strokes. What gives a sense that this is a tabletop, which continues beyond the picture plane, is a slicker surface than the vague, nebulous space behind the woman. Where the mirror has a cursory, picture-book shadow, the woman’s flesh, though frontal, has carefully constructed volume, a sense of roundness in real space.

The clothing of “Girl in Blue Shoes” (1968), a 4-square-foot canvas, almost ensures that this early work is as much about static, manufactured objects as human presence. The short dress of bright stripes is stiffly occupied by its wearer, the sitter, who happens to be the artist’s wife, Betty Jean. The dress, bunched up in the lap, is almost hieratic in its architectonic autonomy, its bars of bright color recalling the regimented foodstuffs of his still lifes. The stripes are delivered in neat, hard-edged strokes and the shoes of the title are relatively spontaneous. When defining the way light falls on limbs or facial features, on the other hand, he is much more focused on specific, local detail. When the artist is engaged in closer looking, his brushstrokes are better behaved.

In a funny way, the star element in this painting is not Mrs. Thiebaud but the giant shadow she and her chair cast, which fills more than half of the composition. This ground is at once traditionalist and modern in implication, recalling the neutral space occupied by a figure in 18th- or 19th-century painting, but also offering more than a nod to abstract color field painting in the clean, cool drag of the brush through barely modulated, lush paint.

A distinct Thiebaud device is to have his grounds almost halo his figures where the two meet. People and things seem almost to plop into the neutral expanses of paint surrounding them in a way that recalls a berry landing in yogurt. And the brushed ground, rather than illustionistically trying to look as if it continues behind the figure, acknowledges pictorial reality with a brushstroke, going against the neat horizontal drag, that follows the contour of the figure. The ground becomes like an immaculately mown lawn with the mower breaking off to deal with a tree or rockery.

The result of this is a strange but telling collision of values. The background, which is essentially abstract, is more “real” in the sense of having a tangible surface, whereas the figure and furniture, realistically rendered, settle into a depictive space, using pictorial means to achieve a sense of depth and volume.

An unfortunate omission from this show, the artist’s 26th with the Allan Stone Gallery, is an example of Mr. Thiebaud’s paintings of majorettes, with which he bridged the divide between his passionless nudes and quasi-erotic edible still lifes. The majorettes capture, in a gorgeously kinky way, the play of light on spandex, the elasticity of marionettelike figures knowingly transforming themselves into figurines in their strange dance rituals.

Something of the voluptuous acuity of these paintings is hinted at, however, by “Ballroom Couple” (1992), an exquisite little panel, almost apologetically hung behind the reception desk, which is the most recent work in the show. This picture, with its rear view of a barebacked, gowned woman bowing to her just-glimpsed, tuxedoed partner, is at once compressed and fluent, drawn and painterly, sharp and slick, encapsulating the dualism that can make this artist so compelling.

Until May 30 (113 E. 90th St., between Lexington and Park avenues, 212-987-4997).