But Renoir’s Classicism was only a phase. By the late 1890s, his figures depart from both reality and the ideal, becoming heavier, longer of torso, shorter of limb and smaller of head. “Large Nude” or “Cushion and Reclining Female Nude” resemble large stuffed dolls in boxes whose backgrounds of casually painted red stripes and green grids, that are among my favorite passages in the show.

In the last years of his life, Renoir’s figures are bronzed and even more outrageously distorted, proto-Botero. But figures and background are united in an intensity of paint-handling, achieving a kind of blazing artifice and an irony that seems implicitly modern. They are at once tributes to Classicism and mannered parodies of it and extremely pertinent to the renewed interest in the figure among younger contemporary painters.

The main example of this conflation is Renoir’s “Two Bathers” — at once magnificent and hard to take — finished, in 1919, the year he died. It hangs in the final gallery, among the nudes of a new generation: Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Léger and Suzanne Valadon, the show’s only female painter. Her blunt account of two women toweling off offers some sweet revenge.

After Renoir, “Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow” is at once sad and inspiring. It pays tribute to Ten Eyck O’Keeffe’s persistence despite little recognition and to her quietly insistent art, some of which survived long enough to be rediscovered.