“Mary Heilman: To Be Someone,” the New Museum, through Jan 26

Elizabeth Peyton, “Live Forever,” the New Museum, through Jan 11

Elizabeth Peyton, Kurt (left) and Mary Heilman, Red, Yellow, and Blue Knot

Photographs: courtesy of the New Museum

Notwithstanding the recent Louise Bourgeois extravaganza at the Guggenheim, it’s still remarkable whenever a female artist gets the retrospective treatment—making the New Museum’s concurrent career overviews of Mary Heilman and Elizabeth Peyton doubly remarkable. This might seem odd given that there appears to be no limit to opportunities for female artists these days. (Peyton herself expresses a similar opinion in one of the videos that make up Chew the Fat, the installation by her ex-husband Rirkrit Tiravanija in the Gugg’s “theanyspacewhatever.”) But they do, in fact, continue to operate under certain subtle constraints, the most of important of which, ironically, is just how their work relates to the legacy of feminism.

That’s one reason for considering Heilman and Peyton together: They offer competing departures from that heritage. Another is that both are painters in an era when the medium-formerly-taken-for-dead has become a reanimated corpse, a Frankenstein’s monster chased by mobs of torchbearing critics and collectors alike.

Born in 1940, Heilman was still fairly young during the tumult of the women’s rights movement in the ’60s and ’70s. Peyton, 25 years her junior, began exhibiting at a time—the 1990s—when feminism had obviously opened doors, yet the very label had fallen into disrepute. The divergences in the two artists’ attitudes are reflected in the titles of their respective shows: Heilman’s “To Be Someone” has the ring of existential affirmation; Peyton’s “Live Forever” is taken from the song of the same name by Brit band Oasis, a paean to the fantasy of eternal youth. The former suggests an artist willing to take on the world on her own terms, the latter an artist snuggled in a cocoon of arrested development. Indeed, Heilman’s forays into the pleasures of paint are as expansive as Peyton’s tiny portraits of aristocrats, rock idols and her very select group of friends are cramped.

Heilman emerged during the alpha-maledom of Postminimalism, when figures as varied as Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra explored the spatial relationship between viewers and art in ways that sometimes seemed aggressive or controlling (like just about any Serra sculpture). For Heilman, however, the space between audience and artwork wasn’t constrained by the concrete; it was a wormhole into some alternate state of imagination—an invitation to grab your board and ride the wave of art history (Heilman surfed as a teenager on the West Coast). This is true of even one her earliest piece here, Starry Night (Night Sky), from 1967. A crude sculptural rendering, it juts out from the wall above your head on a metal bracket, an Arp-ish patch of black firmament dotted by glittery stalactites. Its simplicity is matched only by its audacity in suggesting that the infinite could be found in so funky an object.

More to the point, art for Heilman is something fun and welcoming, rather like Matisse’s notion of the painting as a comfortable armchair—an idea given literal expression by a group of seats designed by Heilman. Built on rolling casters, they let you take a load off while you groove on paintings like Hokusai (2004).

If Peyton’s art were furniture, it would be an ormolu-encrusted divan stuck somewhere in the gilded recesses of Versailles. Though she developed an indelible style right out the gate, Peyton’s work hasn’t aged well. Her early renderings of Napoleon and King Ludwig of Bavaria reminded me of doodles by a lost Romanoff who was pining for better times; her series on self-canceled rocker Kurt Cobain seems absurdly moony.

Peyton has skills, no question. And she has Heilman’s command of color, albeit at much smaller scale. The sense you get is of an artist trapped in her own successful formula: While anyone, it appears, can be Peytonized (even Walt Whitman!) there are limits. When she ventures beyond 12 inches in any dimension, the watery, attenuated nature of her paint-handling becomes distracting, and her illusion of a bubble world built on androgynous good looks breaks down. The rather largish Berlin (Tony), from 2000, is a case in point, with its subject in a kitchen having coffee. Despite his killer cheekbones and runway-perfected mien, he’s saddled with an unruly mop of hair that Peyton’s brush cannot control. He looks like Sideshow Bob, or a frazzled housewife on a bad morning.

Ultimately, Peyton’s pieces don’t tell you much about her, except that she’s spent lots of time cutting pictures out of magazines. The work doesn’t demand much of you, either, except to ask yourself, Am I good enough for the cool-kids’ table? Presumably, you already answered that question in high school.