You have to wait on the teller’s line until a security guard ushers you into a space the size of a walk-in closet, an apt metaphor for the status of postwar women painters versus the macho museum of Pollock, de Kooning, Serra and Close. A beautiful brooding Georgia O’Keeffe rendering of the East River, very much influenced by John Marin and Milton Avery, abuts an extraordinary Buddha-like scroll portrait of Barnett Newman by Hedda Sterne. There’s a particularly strong Florine Stettheimer fandango of figures featuring a society babe being massaged by a black woman.

Grace Hartigan’s take on a Rubens is a fleshy satisfaction. For paint handling, color control and a thoughtful theme, she surpasses Joan Mitchell (there’s a bad scratchy Joan in this show), Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon and Adolph Gottlieb, among second-tier Ab-Exers. The burnt orange Helen Frankenthaler stain in this show is not half bad, but also no Hartigan.

Nancy Graves has a spastic-colored cartoon sculpture that is awful, but Anne Truitt’s Summer Sorcerer is intriguing, a departure from her usual light-enabling palette. An oblong box absorbs dark reds and browns into a well of deep disturbance.

Irene Rice Pereira’s pink and orange rectangles and an ungainly bunch of colored strokes by Elaine de Kooning round out this tiny show, which might inspire a curator or two to think larger thoughts somewhere with the same group of artists.

“Twentieth-Century American Women Artists from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,” Sept. 17-Nov. 2, 2007, at the Gallery at the Park Avenue Bank, 350 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022