Robert Ryman paints monochrome abstractions in white. Albert York paints still lifes, landscapes, nudes, and mythological scenes. One takes modernism to its highest high, the other traditionalism to its most arch. Both are artists who emerged in the 1960s and, on the surface, seem to represent as extreme opposites as can be imagined for directions of painting. Their current shows, however, have an underlying commonality.

Mr. Ryman’s show at PaceWildenstein’s uptown premises ostensibly comprises four works — in fact, one of the works consists of 10 paintings hung into the corner of adjacent walls. The remaining three canvases, similarly sized to one another and installed on three walls of a darkened alcove gallery, could lay equal claim to consideration as a single piece. In other words, the exhibit entails a hermetic tease about structure and definition: What is “a” painting?

The display of Mr. York’s small canvases at Davis & Langdale, on the other hand, could not be less precious in layout. This loan exhibition spans his whole career, from 1963, when he had his first show with what was then named the Davis Gallery, to the late 1980s, when failing health led him to put away his brushes. The modestly scaled pictures efficiently make use of all available space in this homey townhouse gallery, including the backs of closet doors and odd niches in the basement.

If you factor in obstinacy about style, complexity of intention, and intense personal rapport with materials, however, Mr. York is not so different from Mr. Ryman. I must confess that when I saw Mr. Ryman’s name on PaceWildenstein’s schedule I hoped — for the sake of this comparison — for a show of his small, lush, richly painterly canvases. I thought of their impasto and the sense they convey of the artist’s absorption with the act of making in relation to the succulence and opacity of Mr. York’s handling of paint. For a painter of such extreme reduction there are no ends of egress from what might seem a cul-de-sac.

The 10-part painting at PaceWildenstein represents Mr. Ryman in a particularly austere mode. The exposed wood frame in each piece is on the same plane — and is perhaps the same material — as the painting support itself. Paint slightly overlaps the crack between frame and support. What looks to be rollered house paint is virtually unmodulated, except that in each painting it follows slightly different directional flows — horizontal, vertical, diagonal, some mix of the above. The work is forbidding and exclusionary, and only intriguing if you demand to be intrigued.

The three other paintings — and the show, by the way, is titled “No Title Required,” and no checklist exists for it — are slightly more involving.

Canvas is stapled to the wooden support, and the surface is incremental, if hardly impasto, encouraging the eye to linger and settle on nebulous forms. But there is no obvious reward, no patterns to read or forms to decipher.

In Mr. York’s work, inclusiveness is as forceful as exclusiveness is in Mr. Ryman’s. These are gorgeous little pictures, and they know it. The delicious paint and the insouciant access to familiar masters are guaranteed to endear. But precisely for that reason they must have required as much courage to put out into an ever-critical art world as works that are calculated to alienate.

Although there is a sense of singular authorship throughout this oeuvre, there is also an array of historic styles. Mr. York’s pictures often recall Manet, as in “Reclining Female Nude With Cat” (1978). Paintings like the mildly lugubrious nocturne “Landscape With Two Trees and River” (1962) and the fairy painting “Flying Figure in Landscape” (1968) reference American mavericks of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and Louis Eilshemius. Scenes that have the intensity of outsider art rub shoulders with skillful still lifes. “Bread and Wine” (1966) shares an unaffected old masterliness with work from 30 years earlier by another knowing maverick, Sir William Nicholson.

Even when Mr. Ryman was a young outsider he was an insider: His personal discovery of art took place as a custodian at MoMA, where his apotheosis occurred with a retrospective in 1993. Mr. York, by contrast, is almost a caricature of the marginal figure, famously mailing paintings to his New York dealer in a brown envelope and cloaking his artistic origins in mystery. But inside and outside, mainline and maverick, modernist and traditionalist are ultimately details of persona. What unites this odd couple — in my mind, at least — is the exposed nature of the stylistic space in which they pursue their private pleasures. They both seem aware of the obstinacy of their elected idioms. On the canvas there is private, solipsistic play, and the more play that occurs, the weirder the game will appear to the spectator.

When you think you are out on a limb with a comparison it is reassuring to find people of good taste who evidently share your intuition. Among the lenders to Mr. York’s exhibition are Sally and Wynn Kramarsky — collectors best known for their drawings by minimal and postminimalist artists, including Mr. Ryman. It is nice to know there is at least one household where these mavericks cohabit.

Ryman until April 7 (32 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-421-3292);

York until March 31 (231 E. 60th St., between Second and Third avenues, 212-838-0333)