About the chromatic appeal of these floral bouquets, there is a wonderful observation by Thomas Nozkowski in his essay for the show's catalog. "Notice how the city pulls apart," he writes, "to give these stalks and stems room to perform their Matissean shimmy." In some of the paintings- Nasturtiums Before a Red Cloth , for example, and Nasturtiums and Petunias I -the spirited patterns traced by the blossoms, leaves and stems of the flowers do seem to be performing a kind of dance on the canvas, in which every element is not so much composed as choreographed. In other paintings, however- Light Blue Above and Flowers on a Wicker Tray -the flowers in their vases seem to be sitting for their portraits. Under the magic of Ms. Freilicher's fluent brush, they acquire a "personality" that places them beyond the category of still-life.

While landscape and cityscape remain important to Ms. Freilicher's paintings, flowers now appear to have supplanted the human figures as her other commanding interest. It's not a new interest, however. In 1952, when Fairfield Porter reviewed Ms. Freilicher's first exhibition, his principal focus was on a painting called Figure on a Bed , and in retrospect it's interesting to see how accurately he foresaw the direction in which her paintings would be heading in the years to come. "Reading from the top down," Porter wrote, "the figure looks like clouds in a greenish-blue sky, the bed like the opposite banks of a river landscape, the floor and the dog below like the river and near shore," and so on.

Even more interesting, in relation to Ms. Freilicher's current work, is the illustration chosen to accompany that 1952 review: The painting is called Early New York Evening , and it depicts-what else?-a window view of the Manhattan cityscape with a vase of flowers on the window sill in the foreground. The cityscape is rendered far more realistically than in Ms. Freilicher's more recent pictures-the Cubist element remains understated, and the vase of flowers is less demanding of our attention-but the principal pictorial idea was clearly in place more than half a century ago. (You can read the review and see a reproduction of the painting in Art in Its Own Terms , the 1979 collection of Porter's critical essays edited by Rackstraw Downes.)

Something that Porter wrote in 1960, in an essay called "Impressionism and Paintings Today," may also be relevant here. About the flower paintings of Leon Hartl, a painter now forgotten by everyone but the painters who saw his work, and the landscapes of Alex Katz, who is still going strong, Porter observed: "Though Hartl and [Katz] are realists, they are both abstractionists in color." So, indeed, is Jane Freilicher. Abstractionism in color is particularly evident in her two Flora paintings on handmade paper, with their shallow-spaced, all-over structure, and an abstractionist impulse can be seen in all of her recent paintings. It's even more emphatically stated in Seascape , another painting on handmade paper, which has a structure of stacked horizontal forms.

All of this suggests that what we've been witnessing-though not always acknowledging-in the history of American art since the 1950's is a widespread movement among representational painters to come to terms with the powerhouse influence of the Abstract Expressionists. Not only as a critic but also as a painter, this was an issue that Fairfield Porter was absolutely obsessed with: In writing about abstract painting, he often went looking for its subject matter, and in writing about realist painting, he was mainly concerned with pure pictorial form.

What this also suggests is that, in the long term, representational painters may have derived greater benefits-pictorial, aesthetic benefits-from the Abstract Expressionists than abstract painters have. It may be heresy to suggest this, but in the presence of Ms. Freilicher's current exhibition, it's a heresy worth thinking about.

Jane Freilicher: Recent Work remains on view at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, through April 24.

On the other hand, there are many fine paintings to be seen. (Remember painting? Like, you know, oil or acrylic on canvas?) And quite a few excellent drawings and prints, too. "Mixed media" in this show is more likely to refer to combinations of watercolor and encaustic, say, than a pair of old boots attached to a discarded window frame or a monochrome canvas. A rampant nostalgia for the audacities of an antiquated avant-garde is conspicuous by its absence, yet there's much here that's in a direct line of descent from the most creative currents of modern painting and drawing.

Alas, most of the sculpture proves to be more problematic. But then, it's been my impression for some time now that American sculpture is in the doldrums. Or, to put the matter another way, American sculpture has not yet recovered from the blight of Minimalist orthodoxy. Certainly the most accomplished sculpture in the current exhibition is the work of veteran talents who remained untouched by the Minimalist scourge-among them Philip Grausman, whose stainless steel portrait head, John (2000-2), is executed with a flawless purity of form; William King, whose carved pine polychrome figure, September Morn (2002), is equally flawless in its purity of gesture; and Isaac Witkin, whose carved marble Wallenberg Gate (2002) is a masterpiece of what may be called modernist baroque. Yet there's no shortage in this show of the kind of sculpture that is, well, "academic" in the negative sense-a routine rehearsal of a moribund convention.

It is, then, mainly as an exhibition of contemporary American painting that the academy's current annual commands our interest. With stellar examples of such well-known painters as William Bailey, Lois Dodd, Paul Resika, Jane Freilicher, Robert Berlind and Rosemarie Beck, the standard of achievement remains high. It's interesting, too, to be reminded of both the variety and the vitality of abstract painting in the work of William Scharf, Vincent Longo, Joseph Fiore and Sonia Gechtoff, among others. In one respect, however, the selection of paintings for this annual is also weakened by a retreat into academic convention: Too much priority is accorded to paintings of the female nude. Surely the time has come, if it's not indeed overdue, for a re-examination of this exhausted artistic practice. It doesn't help to be reminded of the many great paintings that have been devoted to this subject in the past-both the distant past of the Old Masters and the recent past in the heyday of modernist painting. Yet the many hackneyed female nudes in the current show only serve to remind us of how far we are today from a golden age. Far from revitalizing an established convention, the current crop of female nudes suggests a need to furlough the subject until a talent emerges that's capable of transforming it in ways that speak more directly to the social and cultural life of the 21st century.

And it's not only by comparison with the past that these paintings of the female nude fail to engage our interest. Compared to some of the landscape paintings in the current annual-particularly those by Bernard Chaet, John Dubrow, Gilbert A. Franklin, Jane Freilicher, Philip Jamison, Wolf Kahn, Herbert Katzman, Joe Lasker, Richard Mayhew and Wilbur Niewald-these forlorn paintings of naked women are really dismal. That they were selected by a committee of professional artists only underscores the need to re-examine the entire practice.

Despite these negatives, the National Academy of Design's 178th Annual Exhibition does have much to tell us about the current state of American art-both its achievements and its failures. Think of it as an alternative to the Whitney Museum's Biennial exhibitions, which consistently marginalize not only painting but much else as well in favor of what passes for avant-garde audacity. Even the lesser accomplishments of this annual have a lot to recommend them.

The 178th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design remains on view at the academy, 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, through June 15. The academy galleries are closed on Monday and Tuesday.

To accompany The Artist's Eye exhibition, the academy has also mounted a smaller exhibition of 14 paintings by Ms. Freilicher herself. While The Artist's Eye show is said to have been selected "without regard to theme," the exhibition of Ms. Freilicher's paintings is more narrowly focused on the artist's paintings of New York City. It's clearly intended to remind the public that the scope of this artist's achievements extends well beyond her better-known and much-admired landscape paintings-and it succeeds brilliantly. To A Painter in the City , as this show is called, Ms. Freilicher has brought a level of invention and imagination that most viewers will not have seen before in her work.

The best of these paintings are what might be called inside/outside pictures, which combine interior still-life subjects with exterior views of the Manhattan skyline. In the best of these paintings-my own favorite is a dazzling picture called Parts of a World (1987)-the still-life objects in the foreground are rendered with vivid, lyrical realism in a stark contrast to the hazier view of the distant skyline, which has something of the quality of a mirage or a dreamscape. This divided inside/outside view of the world is, of course, a daily commonplace for many inhabitants of Manhattan, but it has rarely been so beautifully articulated in such a complex, painterly composition.

And if all this isn't enough to underscore the range of Ms. Freilicher's pictorial versatility, she has included in The Artist's Eye the extraordinary Self Portrait in a Mirror (1971), another inside/outside composition that juxtaposes a mirror-image of herself in her Long Island studio with a glimpse of the countryside seen through the studio window.

There are, in fact, a great many portraits and self-portraits in The Artist's Eye , for it was once a requirement for artist-members of the National Academy of Design to submit a self-portrait to qualify for membership, and it was also common practice for these artists to paint portraits of each other. Among the 19th-century examples Ms. Freilicher selected for inclusion are Thomas Eakins' undated painting of Edward W. Redfield and John Singer Sargent's 1892 Self-Portrait . Yet it is in the copious representation of 20th-century portraiture that this exhibition offers some of its most delightful surprises.

There is George Bellows' 1915 portrait of the sculptor Paul Manship; Paul Georges' undated Red Self-Portrait ; John Gilbert's undated portrait of the painter Esteban Vicente; Louisa Matthiasdottir's undated Self-Portrait in Overalls ; Henry Varnum Poor's 1961 Self Portrait ; and Sarai Sherman's Double Portrait of Raphael Soyer (1975), which juxtaposes depictions of the artist in his youth and old age.

There plenty of delights, too, among the non-portrait paintings in The Artist's Eye . These range from a hauntingly beautiful Sunset (1916) by Ralph Albert Blakelock-which is about the size of a postcard-to a sensationally complex composition by Lois Dodd called The Torn Barn (1983), in which nature and geometry, light and shadow, illusion and reality are so deftly intermingled that one hardly knows whether the painting is a subtle exercise in abstraction or a faithful representation of its subject. There are also first-rate examples here of paintings by Charles Cajori, Andrew Forge, Ruth Miller, Herman Rose and-believe it or not-Maxfield Parrish.

I am not at all sure, after two visits to this exhibition, that The Artist's Eye can be accurately described as having been selected "without regard to theme." It's true, of course, that the show encompasses a wide range of subjects and styles, but in just about everything we encounter there's that elusive, difficult-to-define element we used to call quality-or, if you like, aesthetic authority and painterly command of a high order. It's very much to Ms. Freilicher's credit that she was able to discover this sometimes neglected attribute in such a broad range of work.

Both The Artist's Eye: Jane Freilicher as Curator and Jane Freilicher: A Painter in the City remain on view at the National Academy of Design Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue between 89th and 90th streets, through Sept. 22. The museum's hours are Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 5 p.m., and Friday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; it's closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Meanwhile, to avail yourself of the pleasures of Intimate Interiors , you will have to venture out to Fairfield County, Conn., where the show is installed in the suburban branch of the Whitney Museum that is housed in the headquarters of the Champion International Corporation in downtown Stamford. Does this venue suggest, perhaps, that the Whitney's top brass still regards painting of this sort-painting that is representational and, you know, more than a little delightful to look at-as an O.K. thing for conventional suburban tastes but ineligible to compete for attention in the intellectually tougher climate of the New York art world? That would indeed seem to be the case.

Only once before, as far as I can remember, has the Whitney condescended to devote an exhibition to the paintings of Fairfield Porter. That was some 16 years ago, and the result was something of a scandal. What happened was this. In 1983, a major retrospective of Porter's work- Fairfield Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction -was organized at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was a terrific show, and to the surprise of the folks at the M.F.A., it proved to be one of the most popular exhibitions of 20th-century art ever mounted in Boston. Yet attempts to interest the Whitney in bringing the show to New York, where Porter was far better known as a painter and a critic, were initially turned down. One of the museum's curators said at the time that Porter's work was "too tame" for the Whitney to exhibit. And that was before the arrival of David Ross.

Under pressure from some well-placed people, however, the Whitney finally agreed to accept an abridged version of the Boston show, and then added injury to insult by saddling this truncated exhibition with an atrocious installation. Not only were the paintings crowded into an inadequate space, but the walls were painted gaudy colors-in the hope, no doubt, that they would add some visual pep to a show considered too drab for the New York public. It was all unforgivably awful.

Jane Freilicher hasn't fared much better at the Whitney. In one of the recent Whitney Biennial disasters that was staged before Mr. Ross' unlamented departure for San Francisco, a few of her paintings could be seen, as I recall, amid the dreck that otherwise dominated the premises on those occasions. Looking at Ms. Freilicher's paintings in that company, however, was a little like trying to listen to a Mozart quartet at some in-your-face disco blowout. It was hardly conducive to a proper appreciation of either the delicacy or the strength of her work. From such a token representation of her work in those disagreeable circumstances, moreover, no newcomer to Ms. Freilicher's paintings could have any idea of the scale of her achievement.

Fortunately, the exhibition that Cynthia Roznoy has mounted in Intimate Interiors does much to correct the record for both of these artists. The selection of paintings is excellent, and the presentation of them in the spacious galleries of the Whitney's Champion International branch is splendid. There are paintings there by both artists that are likely to be unfamiliar even to observers who have followed their work closely-Porter's early Self-Portrait (1948), for example, and the three powerful early interior still-life paintings by Ms. Freilicher dating from 1953-55-as well as some of the big, better-known later pictures. While by no means a substitute for the full-scale retrospectives that these painters should be given in a New York museum, Intimate Interiors is in many respects an ideal introduction to both of their oeuvres .

Intimate Interiors has the additional merit of allowing us to see more clearly than hitherto the differences-mainly differences of temperament and taste-that separate these painters who otherwise have so much in common. There is, for one thing, an expansiveness of feeling-an element of exuberance-in Ms. Freilicher's later paintings we do not find in Porter, who is more guarded and subdued in the emotions he brings to painting. Hers is a more outgoing response to experience, while Porter's is at once more intellectual and more conservative, more attuned to a premodern pictorial tradition. In the command of color and light Ms. Freilicher brings to her painting, there is an abiding loyalty to Matisse-and to what Hans Hofmann made of Matisse -that gives to all of her later work a special vibrancy, while in Porter's painting there is a parallel affinity for Vuillard that makes itself felt in the painterly nuances he is able to wrest from the shadow world of bourgeois intimacy.

Intimate Interiors is also a reminder that both Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter remain seriously underrated painters-underrated, that is, by the official opinion that governs the taste of so many of our curators, collectors and critics. They are underrated in the same way that Bonnard was underrated for so many years-underrated because he didn't fit into anyone's official account of modern painting. Now that Bonnard has been trium-phantly vindicated as one of the greatest of modern masters, can we expect those American painters who followed a similarly independent course to be given the high-level recognition they deserve? Given the cultural politics of the American museum world, I wouldn't count on it, but a show like Intimate Interiors might do something to hasten the day. It remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Atlantic Street at Tresser Boulevard, in downtown Stamford, Conn., through May 19. The hours are 11 A.M. to 5 P.M., Tuesday through Saturday, and admission is free.