Confronted with Pablo Picasso’s “Bras” (1959), a late bronze sculpture of a life-size arm and spread hand standing upright, as if it were waving hello, I wondered if it was intended as a sort of visual pun. The meaty, laborer’s digits suggested it was based on the artist’s own appendage, so perhaps the witty Picasso was making a play on the phrase “the artist’s hand,” which in art history refers to the signature marks an artist makes when drawing, painting, or sculpting.

The sculpture is just one of a remarkable group of works by Picasso – on view at Acquavella Gallery until June 1 – that provide evidence of the artist’s hand through many of the styles in which he worked. With only 12 examples included, the show does pass over several important periods in Picasso’s career, notably the early blue and rose periods, as well as the period from about 1907 through 1912, when he was developing Analytic Cubism. Still, it’s one of the finest Picasso shows one is likely to see outside a museum for some time.

Chronologically the show begins in the 1920s, with the massive Neoclassical figures of “Baigneur and Baigneuses” (1921), an oil depicting three bathers, one male and two female. World War I had dissipated the extraordinary fecundity of the Cubist years, and, in the aftermath, Picasso, already famous for the near-abstraction of his Cubist works, turned to a more traditional figurative style. In 1917 he traveled to Rome with Jean Cocteau in order to produce the scenery and costumes for Diaghilev’s ballet “Parade.” Many cite the influence of this trip on the development of what is called Picasso’s Neoclassical period. But, while Picasso did at times emulate the style of one of his heroes, the French Neoclassical painter Jean-Dominique Ingres (who had also spent time in Rome), it was the classical subject matter of the massive nudes that led people to call them Neoclassical.

Bathers were seen in artworks from the time of antiquity, and they were a favorite of another major influence, Paul Cezanne. Yet, in “Baigneur and Baigneuses,” as in his other massive nudes, Picasso gives a proletarian twist to the subject. Three stocky, peasant-like figures lounge by the sea. A man, who resembles the artist, stands in a tiny white bathing suit, his fists balled, between two nude women, one sitting with her back turned as the other, partially draped, sits looking at the man. The complexity in this magnificent and otherwise forthright picture comes from the mysterious relationship between the figures.

That sort of social or symbolic complexity remains a far cry from the difficulties presented by other works from the 1920s on view. “Partition, Guitare, Compotier” (1924), an oil hung in a different room, bridges the formal problems of the early Synthetic Cubist period with the psychological deformations of Picasso’s Surrealist period of the 1920s. Here a musical score, guitar, and fruit bowl filled with green apples appear on a table, which has been tipped toward the viewer, emphasizing the flat, two-dimensional character of painting. By the time he made the elegant “Tete” (1928), Picasso had, for the moment, fully embraced the symbolic carnival of Surrealism. A linear drawing in oil, the painting offers a biomorphic “head,” which looks like a C-clamp with eyes and teeth, perched over a series of lines.

From the 1920s until his death in 1973, Picasso famously swerved among any number of stylistic modes. In the 1930s, for instance, one finds a typically Surreal biomorphic abstraction like the white “Acrobate” (1930) as well as a thoroughly atypical painting like “Femme au Chapeau de Paille” (1937), which belongs to a style one could only call Picassoesque. Perhaps what is surprising about the picture is the liveliness of the woman in the straw hat: She looks out with large eyes and a bright red, lipstick smile, free of the violent lens through which the artist so often viewed his women. Even her wavy hands and red-tipped nails have an untroubled lyricism. Two years on, in “Nu Assis (Dora Maar)” (1939), he balances the violence of his depiction with a fireworks display of color. In this case, a black ground shows off the wild patchwork of colors – blues, violets, yellows, greens, and fiery oranges – that make up the fractured image of the seated Dora Maar.

The exhibition skips over the 1940s, when Picasso sat out World War II in the south of France, to arrive at what is arguably the most important work here, “L’Atelier a la Californie” (1955), an homage to his great friend and rival Henri Matisse, who had died in 1954. Through a crowded studio interior, enlivened by dense patterning, one sees a window opening onto palm trees. But, unlike Matisse’s red interior, this studio scene is rendered in mournful grays, blacks, and muted greens. The canvas comes from a suite of 12 “Californie” paintings that were described in the catalogue for MoMA’s exhibition “Matisse Picasso” as “amongst the most overtly Matissean works that Picasso ever produced.” What distinguishes the Acquavella picture is the fullness of detail: It is without a doubt a better, more fully realized painting than the version included in the MoMA show.

There are two works from the 1960s, the artist’s final, and least desirable, period, though these examples show no significant drop-off in vitality. In fact, a pencil drawing, “Femme Nue, Homme a la Pipe et Chien” (1969), represents, with a strong and clear line, a nude woman watched by a man in 18th-century garb. One could take it as an ironic look back at his Neoclassicism of the 1920s.

Acquavella’s retrospective glances back with an eye for quality. At a time when paintings and drawings by the very young crowd the galleries both downtown and uptown, it is refreshing to tour the life’s work of a master.

Until May 17 (18 E. 79th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-734-6300). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.