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For some of us, the persistent museum-goers, the art geeks for whom vacations in far-flung cities are a really pretext for seeing an interesting exhibition — for us, four words inevitably give us pause.

From the permanent collection.

But at this time of year you'll see them a lot, pasted to mishmashed shows of disparate artists corralled under an epic Cinemascope aesthetic. The older-richer-smarter museums have the collections to make that work well enough, surfacing renown artists or unusual work cast in concentrated, diverting themes.

For instance, this summer the 67-year-old Guggenheim Museum plumbs its impressive collection of Jackson Pollock (thank you, Peggy Guggenheim), focusing "No Limits, Just Edges" on his less celebrated works on paper. And "Degas to Picasso: Modern Masters," which is described as "a kaleidoscopic survey of European art from 1900 to the 1960s," was amassed from collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of course, the Naples Museum of Art hasn't been collecting as long or as deeply as museums like these. The Naples permanent collection, which was created in 1989, comprises roughly 1,200 objects — about 85 percent paintings and 15 percent sculpture. Approximately 30 percent of that collection remains on display most of the time, say museum administrators.

But this is summer, after all. So after an ambitious exhibition on the Wyeth dynasty came down in May, "Selections from the Recent and Contemporary Collection" went up. The show, which "features rarely seen works, and juxtapositions of works," runs through July 30.

Submitted photo

Claes Oldenburg, "Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals" (1969) Lithograph

I was worried.

Taken as a whole, "Selections" is a jagged piece of business. There's a watery 20th-century aesthetic here, but conceptually that's a big, big pond. And without consistent wall text to enunciate the piece-to-piece connections and a distinct curatorial focus, the show feels meandering and loose. Some forgettable work, some Big Names and the unexpected stumble, here and there, onto a piece that resonates for you, but that might never make it onto the walls. Except for a show like this.

Balcomb Greene's "Head of a Woman" (1968) is one of the latter. Greene's quavering lines — a wide, nervous X for the divot on the top lip and a jangley river for the ear and jaw — hint at the abstracted road map of one woman's face. It is elliptical and delicate and even in its vagaries, somehow not generic at all. It reminded me of the Exquisite Corpse, one of the Surrealist's favorite parlor game. In it, players contribute random words blind to sentence in the making, building unmoored but oddly poetic phrases.

As ghostly as Green's drawing is, Carlos Mérida's 1973 mixed-media work, "Landscape of the Cruel City," is vertical solid, a jigsaw of raspberry, brown, blue and orange. The colors are a guilty pleasure — lush, dewy and rich — and entirely enough to engage as you try to puzzle out the distended fork at the center of the work. Very tasty.

Keep walking.

Submitted photo

Nam June Paik, "Farnsworth" (1996) Mixed media and video

There's some pretty (a bronze of outsized fruits right out of Pier I ); some empty (Jean Simon Labret's two glass pieces a la Lite-Brite); some historically significant (one of Richard Anuszkiewicz's Op explorations of color).

Toward the back there's a charming Claes Oldenburg piece called "Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals" (1969). The lithograph playfully adds, subtracts and equates three-prong plugs with Good Humor bars with a geometric mouse with Oldenberg himself, all neatly drafted on graph paper around a self-portrait of one worse-for-wear artist.

As promised there are more big names. American painter Sam Francis makes a couple of appearances. "Untitled" (1983) is a gorgeous, sprawling piece with a startling energy. Here, the acrylic paint lands on the paper in globs, lakes and spitballs of pure color, thick and wet and definite — like children in parkas falling into the early morning snow.

Nam June Paik's "Farnsworth" (1996) is fabulous, of course, and familiar for friends of the Phil: It's been on display since it was acquired in 2004. Although the wall text (wall text!) says it pays tribute to Philo Farnsworth, an inventor of television technology, it solidly speaks of the late artist's interest-cum-obsession in the self-reflexive nature of modern life.

In nine vintage TVs stacked to form a chunky human figure, Paik pairs pop culture and political giants with television iconography: "Please Stand By" stutters by, followed by a grim John F. Kennedy and then a "Honeymooners" Jackie Gleason. Sputnik, Nixon and Vietnam swim past images of a sassy Mick Jagger and the early Beatles. Paik asks us: Are we our images or are they us? And does television turn everything it gobbles into rough equivalents?

The Robert Rauschenberg, which was acquired and displayed last season, is disappointing, a minor snippet from the stream-of-conscious imagery that this art superhero continues to expel-explore in his work.

The Jim Dine (also on display last season)? Like his series of bathrobe images, Jim Dine's heart series emerged from Pop Art penchant for incorporating everyday objects and common emblems in work that questioned (and twisted) their fundamental meanings. But the muddy "Winter Heart Number 7" (no date) is wane, not much more challenging than the Hallmark mainstay itself.

In the end, it wasn't a Big Name that gave me my can-I-slip-it-in-my-purse moment.

Like so many post-modern artists, Tom Gengler borrows from surprising sources, creating a brand new whole from estranged parts. This small, carefully painted canvas called "Bathers" (1984) is populated by women in states of undress; hard women, sweet women, porcelain women; women painted in the styles of Ingres, of Renior, of Edward Hopper, of True Crime magazine covers — all coexisting in this shaggy dog of an art joke.

At the heart of it, though, is something more opaque than art history punditry. It's a quiet tension in the beckoned voyeurism of hidden faces, in the shadowy disconnect between women of different worlds. Beautiful, smart and strangely haunting.

And maybe that's just enough.

Reach Mobley-Martinez at tmmartinez@naplesnews.com.