David Smith’s centennial is doing the man proud. His retrospective at the Guggenheim, justly hailed in these pages by Lance Esplund when it opened six weeks ago, has him looking like America’s Rodin, our principal claim to sculptural greatness.It is a radically streamlined presentation that still manages to celebrate the diversity, inventiveness, and protean originality of this Modernist giant.

Now comes a superlative display of almost two dozen significant sculptures at Gagosian and a supporting cast of paintings, drawings, and reliefs. Curated by the artist’s daughter, Candida Smith, and the director of the Smith estate, Peter Stevens, “David Smith: Personage” is a good-natured corrective to Carmen Gimenez’s passionate yet partial Guggenheim exhibition.

Sounding like Arthurian dragons in their abbreviations, Gug and Gag can be seen struggling for Smith’s soul.The museum stresses his Modernism,his abstraction,his singularity; the family and estate go more for his humanism, his roots, his sense of connectedness.While the Guggenheim show doesn’t deny Smith’s debt to Giacometti and Picasso, it tends to bolster the formalist line of Rosalind Krauss that downplayed Smith’s Surrealism. Gagosian, on the other hand, focuses on the last two decades of his output to reveal the continued figurative bias of this sculptural peer of the Abstract Expressionists.

Though Smith was steeped in the Surrealist movement, he is often seen to have shed any vestige of the oneiric and the absurd. But the Gagosian show – beginning with its title – stresses the otherness and oddity of his figuration. Right into the 1950s, in works cast in bronze from found objects, Smith’s personages have a jocularity and jauntiness that recall Miro and Tanguy’s figuration and the Surrealist game of “exquisite corpse.” “Portrait of a Painter” (1954) plays on familiar tropes, making a head from a palette, a trunk from what could be read as an architectural rule, and a foot from a shoe tree. It is a sculpture that obstinately demands to be read flat.

Gagosian’s thematic, rather than chronological, installation also contrasts with the Guggenheim show. Ms. Gimenez uses Frank Lloyd Wright’s space exquisitely to cordon off each sculpture, which has the effect of abstracting Smith’s oeuvre: We are left to sense his formal development by following the curving concourse, savoring each piece’s individuality. In addition, Ms. Gimenez has isolated Smith’s works on paper from the sculptures.

A hallmark of the Gagosian show is the elegantly persuasive juxtaposition of his two- and three-dimensional work.There is little sense of a causal relationship between drawing and sculpture, of the former fueling the latter; instead, each seems the right way in a given moment to explore a continual fascination with the body, with groundedness, with verticality.

Smith acknowledged the odd fact of his body consciousness. When the English critic David Sylvester told him that he saw even his big, stainless steel works of the early 1960s – among his most resolutely abstract works – as personages, Smith replied: “They don’t start that way. But how can a man live off of his own planet? […] There is no such thing as truly abstract. Man always has to work from his life.”

“Tower I” (1963) vindicates Sylvester’s point: More than 23 feet high, it soars toward Gagosian’s ceiling, rhyming with the exposed rafters as if to emphasize its rootedness in readymade industrial materials. It has a constructivist, linear ruggedness, recalling at once Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” and Picasso’s “Hommage to Apollinaire,” as well as connecting, despite its resolute verticality, to Smith’s earlier landscape-oriented drawings in space. But in the context of this emphasis on the figure (and due to our primal urgings), we can’t help but see figural implications in the limb-like crossings of metal. An abundance of straight lines viewed in the round and in motion forces parallelograms on the eye, introducing almost voluptuous curves to this essay in angularity.

In the context of this show, drawings like “2-22-56” (1956) – in which a single stroke or two in orange tempera is contrapuntally embellished in black ink – read less like variations on a theme, more like families. This comes across even more clearly in the fast,emphatically sexed and aged personages of “* 10/5/4/53,” (1953), especially when seen – as in the catalog – next to Smith’s photographs of his grouped arrangements of flattened stick figures in the landscape.

One of the chief glories of this gorgeous show – and the sorest omission of the Guggenheim exhibition – is the late paintings in enamel on canvas made directly from the figure. These sensuous, erotically charged nudes reveal the persistence of the painter in Smith’s artistic personality. Pollocklike swirls of enamel (probably worked on the floor) celebrate the life force without compromising the tough, inquisitive, radical nature of his abstract sculptural inventions.The nudes from 1964 are as much Matisse as his stick figures are Picasso. They provide a liberating key to Smith’s late sculptures, which are still surprisingly forbidding.

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The veteran Magnum photographer Dan Budnik did for Smith what Brassai did for Picasso and Namuth for Pollock: He canonized a sense of the creative process. On Friday, Knoedler will open “Seeing David Smith: Photographs by Dan Budnik,” a show comprising photos of Smith, his studios, and his Bolton Landing setups.

Mr. Budnik’s heroic, at times theatrical take on the blue-collar physicality of Smith’s production is offset by the strangely tender sense of this tough, awkward man’s personal rapport with his sculpture. In “David Smith at His Junk pile … January, 1963,” – where the slumped, bear-like figure stomps through the snow – and in the audaciously composed, Hopper-like “David Smith Creating the Model for Cubi IV From Liquor Boxes Inside His Living Room … December, 1962,” you get a sense not only of Smith’s existential isolation but of his ease with his surroundings.

A classic image of the artist adjusting the position of “Volton XVIII,” his arms embracing the jagged, collaged form, his feet firm in the snow, looks like Jacob wrestling his angel, or a dancing odd couple. More to the point, though, the living man and his abstract creation combine to form a single, compelling entity.

Smith until April 15 (555 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-741-1111). Prices for sculptures: $3 million-$5 million. Prices for works on paper: $135,000-$200,000. Budnik until May 26 (19 E. 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-794-0550). Prices: $5,000 and up.