Sometimes, you actually do need to read the press release. The anouncement card for Jonathan Podwil’s show at the West Village venue lane Space showed an interior with a ong couch with rounded ends set gainst an imposing, almost dauntng, window and drapes. Figures of ineterminate sex could just about be made out seated at either end of the couch. The treatment was moody though hardly sinister. The way the furniture seemed to melt into its surrounding atmosphere momentarily recalled J.M.W. Turner’s “Interior at Petworth” (1837) or a Bonnard, though the smudgy, murky, tonal palette was more like Walter Sickert’s.

But the source for Mr. Podwil’s ethereal, atmospheric image is actually specific, historical, and of portent: a meeting in Bahgdad between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein that took place in 1983 when the American served as special envoy from President Reagan. The video footage from which the artist extracted his image shows the politicians exchanging pleasantries and shaking hands before sitting down to business, with functionaries from both sides seated around the room.

Although the video — which is much viewed online — is blurry, it is clearly legible. The painterly treatment adopted by Mr. Podwil transforms an event with wellknown players and political implications into a nebulous, open-ended image. The handshake that opened the meeting is now extremely well-known; the moment captured by Mr. Podwil that ends the clip is less ubiquitous.

Just as the space depicted has an odd mix of the bland and the grand, so Mr. Podwil’s paintings have at once symbolist charge and postmodern affectlessness. Mr. Podwil’s show of a dozen works, all from 2006, are variants on this same image. In one instance, “Meeting 1983 (dictator)” the image is cropped so that only Hussein is viewable; others are triptychs and diptychs that repeat the image, or focus on one end of it, as if offering slowed down frames. More often, the variance is in color: Blue and steely grays are used for two paintings that depict the scene in camera negative, in contrast to the rich reds and greens that survive the intentional murk of the tonal treatment.

When you know what is being depicted, the paintings have some kind of purpose, but when it is left to the viewer to construct a possible scenario, the imagery has more poignancy. There is an almost sexual tension between the protagonists clinging to the comfortable edges with the sea of velvet between them — like the first meeting of bride and groom at an arranged marriage.

In literally and ideologically blurring a political event for aesthetic ends, Mr. Podwil joins a recent tradition of intentionally ambiguous treatment of historic controversy that includes Gerhard Richter, with his series devoted to the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, and Luc Tuymans, with his paintings about post-colonial Congo. But Mr. Podwil drains even more significance from his chosen event than these artists. By making a dozen variants of one moment implies more interest in a new kind of still life than in reviving history painting. Business deals with dictators are a content that become as distant from Mr. Podwil’s handling of the form as Giorgio Morandi’s obsessively painted jars and bottles are from the food products or cosmetics they once contained. As such, Mr. Podwil’s paintings are as much about the state of art as the state of foreign affairs.

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In terms of ambition and milieu, Barbara Grossman is far removed from Mr. Podwil. She follows a familiar postwar aesthetic in which one hears Matisse spoken with an American accent. A founding member, in 1969, of the cooperative Bowery Gallery and an influential educator, her paintings are epicurean and intellectually uncomplicated in their “luxe, calme, et volupté.”

And yet, there are points of affinity between these two painters. They both depict interiors. They are equally unswerving in their fidelity to a chosen mood. And they are unabashed at seeming to paint the same composition over and over. In Mr. Podwil, the scratched record is part of his message; the compulsion to repeat has to do with temporal, political, and geographic remoteness.

In Ms. Grossman, such intentionality is unlikely. But her monomania is just as striking, craving interpretation. Her motif is of two or three young women singing from sheet music in richly decorated, if economically furnished, rooms. Often, a rug under their feet pushes up against the picture plane, blurring the spatial boundary between wall and floor, striking equivalence between the whole scene and the ornamental rug within it.

There is a beautiful line in Ms. Grossman’s painting. Strongly reminiscent of Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, it is at once awkward and at ease, tense and felicitous. The women are pretty and wear dresses of hot contrasting colors redolent of Matisse’s principal American emulator, Milton Avery: orange, pink, and salmon, for instance, in “Orange Kelim” (2006).

An unkind observer would deduce that the artist has arrived at a formula. But the painterly intelligence and liveliness in each work belies that conclusion. There are subtle shifts of interest and emphasis in each composition, and for the artist, clearly, each painting stands apart from its peers. But she can’t be oblivious to her own repetition syndrome. Perhaps the cue should be taken from her musical motif: a belief that practice makes perfect.

Podwil until February 4 (102 Charles St., between Bleecker and Hudson streets, 917-606-1266);

Grossman until January 27 (530 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, fourth floor, 646-230-6655).