This winter, Terry Winters can feel content: He has shows up of recent graphic works and of 1980s paintings at the Manhattan Gallery of the Pratt Institute, where he graduated in 1971, and Matthew Marks. These coincide with a 10-year survey of his work in all mediums at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass., curated by Adam Weinberg, former director of the gallery and now head of the Whitney. It is a good time to take stock of a remarkable career.

The varied series of drawings and prints at Pratt, fabulously installed in striking, Donald Juddlike vitrines apparently of Mr. Winters’s design, show – as any group of his works do – the protean nature of his imagination. He is an artist, like Picasso, who thinks in series, and when you view a large body of interrelated images you begin to experience a strange sense of imagery continuing between each picture.

The distance between dispatches, however, is considerable – and, anyway, we don’t know for sure how true to the initial creative succession the artist was under any obligation to be. Picasso’s drawings of the 1930s, documented by Christian Zervos in “Cahiers d’Art” with anthropological meticulousness, were dated to the day, a powerful rhetorical statement about drawing as the working of the unconscious. “Je suis le cahier,” Picasso declared: I am the sketchbook.

Mr. Winters’s drawings look with particular avidity toward Picasso: The first page in his suite of drawings “Local Group, June 1,2004″directly recalls Picasso’s line-and-dot technique of the early 1920s, in which constellations of implied depth are generated on the flat surface, with cuneiform simplicity.

But he isn’t limited to Picasso in his reference: He brings to mind a myriad of lesser artists, many of them disciples of Picasso, and, tellingly, artists at the interstice of pure abstraction and either surrealism or expressionism: Stanley William Hayter with his complex wave formations, Hans Hartung, with his dense, brooding webs of scribble. Mr. Winters’s palette often recalls salon abstraction of the 1950s in the way it manages to be at once shrill and muddy.

Mr. Winters is himself a curious amalgam of cultural influences: He is, by temperament, a romantic, but by generation and affiliation he belongs with an anti-romantic late Modernism that favors conceptual explorations of system, process, and object over any notion of art coming from the depths of individual genius or collective unconscious.

What we get from this tension is a strange, troubled degree of investment in the individual mark. Like Susan Rothenberg, Mr. Winters’s touch is strongly inflected by a personal handwriting but somehow holds back from overt, “ejaculatory” expressionism, as Robert Storr has said of Ms. Rothenberg.

The recent drawings, in Mr. Winters’s characteristically robust, scribbly, charcoal-heavy hand, reference Modernism in their fascination with the grid. To see the group of paintings from the first half of the 1980s, when he hit the scene, is to be reminded how much of a break with the Minimal and conceptual recent past he presented. The works have a very European feel, which would have related him with the tide of neo-expressionism: The Dane Per Kirkeby particularly comes to mind in a painting like “Good Government” (1984), for instance, with its earthy, chocolatey palette and its sense of forms at once carefully delineated and awkwardly inscribed.

What is Old Masterly about this image, without being anachronistic, is the very different speed of figure compared with ground: There is no Modernist idea here about the whole image coming into being in unity. The individual objects – somewhere between caterpillar and the nutshell in their cellular structure – evolve at their own pace but in hidden harmony with their neighbors and the universe they inhabit.

At Pratt until December 18 (144 W. 14th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-647-7778).

At Matthew Marks until December 24 (523 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-243-0200).

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There’s a conventional wisdom that neo-conceptualism is a light version of a heavy-duty original. In their philosophical and political questioning of the fundamentals of art, the pioneers of the 1960s movement took puritanical pride in producing visually arid, intellectually forbidding work. They were proud to be part of the “dematerialization of the art object,” taking art into the realm of pure concept and away from bourgeois luxury goods.

Younger artists of the last decade or so, while looking with certain nostalgia to the iconoclasm of that period, introduced designer verve to jolly up their creations. The intellectual ambitions remained intact, but the work got sexier and more saleable. Current shows of veteran conceptualists, however, force us to rethink this narrative: It seems that, in their second childhood, some of the pioneers are taking on characteristics of the “neos.”

Take, for instance, the more recent work of Joseph Kosuth. His classic contributions were studiedly drab assaults on any notion that art needed aesthetic appeal. He would take an object like a clock, for example – making sure to select as ubiquitous an example as he could find – photograph it, and present the object itself, its image, and several blown-up dictionary definitions of the word “clock.” On one occasion his exhibition consisted of a table heaped with the literature he wanted you to read in connection with an idea he wished to convey.

But Mr. Kosuth obviously confronted the dilemma of how to sustain a life in art from such pristine, antiaesthetic actions. His answer lay in graphic design: text remained paramount, expressive handling of materials verboten, color rare. But through meticulous choice of font and means of presentation he set about sounding clever and looking pretty. A trademark idiom became text with lines neatly ruled through them, set on Wehrmacht gray walls, dictionary definitions projected onto elegantly if austerely draped exhibits in museums.

His latest installation suggests his design in lightening up, if not his reading. “A Propos (Reflecteur de Reflecteur),” (2004) displays 86 quotes on 289 glass panels, each back-lit by neon strips. The selected words reflect highbrow tastes dominated by Continental thinkers, many of them intellectually fashionable: Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, a paragraph from whom forms the 139-word-long title of the show (unless you count the author’s name and date – which I guess you should, really – in which case it is 142 words long, possibly a record).

The quotations are by no means without interest, but it would have required more determination than I brought to it to find connecting themes. Perhaps to do so is to ask too much of the piece. In reality, the installation is an update of the neoclassical habit of placing images of the great on institutional facades; only here the thinkers are represented by words rather than visages. The work is about the thought of meaning – and the career of meaning – rather than meaning itself.

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Stripes and representations are also of the essence in John Baldessari’s new installation at Marian Goodman. Of similar vintage to Mr. Kosuth, if not quite on the same plateau of pretension, Mr. Baldessari has been an influential teacher on the West Coast as well as an internationally celebrated artist.

His trademark idiom uses a black-and-white movie still and blots out significant features (faces, for instance) with brightly colored geometric shapes. Balls were his big thing, though in the current show, stripes and more amorphous shapes appear. These range formally from deep cutout to smooth paint, either on the plexiglass surface or within it.

There are film stills blown up to a large scale, whose playfully subversive inserted figures recall Max Ernst’s collages. In “Two Person Fight (One Orange): with Spectator” (2004), an actress in Western costume fights with an orange King Kong type silhouette. “Twenty Gazes: Women, Black and White (one in Color)” (2004) belongs to the other composition type favored in this show, in which stills of similar category form a pristine stack.

The eyes in this work belong to stars of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. By stockpiling signifiers of desire any actual desire evaporates, which may be the point of the piece. Still, the work could provide hours of parlor-game amusement to its eventual owners and their guests.

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Barbara Kruger, too, has a trademark graphic design strategy, looking to Russian Constructivism and Berlin Dada, tapping the revolutionary fervor of these historic moments as surely as Mr. Kosuth does the authority of the dictionary, or Mr. Baldessari does the glamour of Hollywood.

But there has never been a conflict of values, in her aesthetic, between graphic design and political purpose. Tellingly, she is an artist who emerged in the 1980s, a golden age for the interaction of slickness and posture. Ms. Kruger uses black, white, and red to declamatory ends, often with white italicized letters on a red boundary, the texts superimposed upon grainy, appropriated images. Her politics falls in line with her styling, offering bolshy and belligerent castigations of consumer culture and sexism.

There is still plenty of lecturing and hectoring in the latest show. But there is a newfound poetic quality, a wistfulness even, mixed in with the agitprop. An American flag has text in the place of the white decorations: in lieu of stars she writes: “Look for the moment when pride becomes contempt” while the stripes comprise a series of questions culminating in “Who Salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?”

Kosuth until December 4 (528 W. 29 Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-239-1181). Prices: $25,000-$150,000.

Baldessari until January 8 (24 W. 57 Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-977-7160). The gallery declined to disclose its prices.

Kruger until December 18 (745 Fifth Avenue, between 57th and 58th Streets, 212-752-2929). Prices: $10,000-$50,000.