How many times have you heard collectors say, “We have Koons, we have Kusama, we have Kaws . . .,” as if the artists are locked up in the basement, since having their work means having them, while possession, apparently, is 9/10ths of the law. The Vandals, its title and theme via short stories by Edith Wharton, The House of the Dead Hand, and Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, goes further; its press release opens with a line from Wharton: ‘The vandals,’ he muttered, ‘the desecrators of beauty; if I thought it would ever get into their hands I’d burn it first.’ The curators suggest these stories “propose that to fully apprehend art may itself constitute a form of vandalism. Looking becomes inseparable from domination; admiration slips toward desecration . . .” Here, points surely earned for a summer group show with a literary, at times perverse bent by way of unexpected juxtapositions.

In close proximity to Pope.L’s Changing Station (Form) (2008) is a great Weegee, Nurse Irma Twiss Epstein accused of killing a baby, Feb. 9, 1942. Her face hidden from the camera in black gloved hands, she appears a contorted abstraction. An undated self-portrait by heiress and recluse Huguette Clark (holding a palette), is near to a fantastic picture (a museum-goer tilts his head sideways to view David’s The Death of Marat), by Vivian Meier, the obsessive photographer/nanny only discovered after her death, her work bought at an auction of storage units. The curators refer to “artworks hidden from public view.” Clark and Meier, artists hidden from view. Elsewhere, Joseph Cornell, Arthur Jafa, Mark Leckey, George Platt Lynes, and Robert Colescott’s Masked Lady (1964), inspired by his years spent in Cairo, a real revelation. —Bob Nickas

Amid a calm, measured setting, myriad moments in close proximity—lyrical, poignant, unreal yet perfectly reasonable—as in dreaming—images and objects upended, reflecting our troubled times, no end in sight. Anyone who follows Robert Gober’s work won’t fail to register his recurring imagery, a persistence of vision, obsession as meditation? If you know his Slides of a Changing Painting, 1982-83, you sense, from one exhibition to the next, that this early durational experiment was the seed from which an unfolding body of work initially took root. The imagery that has followed plays out over and anew: A high barred window. A playpen, deformed. A door, backlit. A man’s dark shoe. Crackly fallen leaves. Trees, bare branches. A small glass heart, pulsing slowly, deep crimson, aglow. Life or something like it goes on.

The wall-mounted box works (descended from Cornell?), worlds within worlds, loss and longing, a subtle erotics. One recurrent motif, that barred window, despite a hopeful glow beyond, is a reminder that this is a time of cruel detention. The worn shoe tips pointed up from below … a body partially buried? Are we in a House of Melancholy? That’s the title of a painting by Harry Leith-Ross, ca. 1940, a wintry scene of a derelict cabin under a smudged sky, a ladder leaned up to the roof, a snow covered upholstered chair placed as if to take in the view. A black crow completes the scene. It’s part of a show within the show, pairing works by Leith-Ross and his lifelong friend John Folinsbee, painters associated with the Pennsylvania Impressionists.

What first attracted Gober to them was a photo from 1913. They’re posed with other students in a plein-air painting class. The two men smiling, Folinsbee piggybacked onto Leith-Ross, may appear as youthful clowning around. But a wall text informs us that Folinsbee contracted polio as a child. Confined to a wheelchair, his friend carried him outside to spots outdoors where they would paint. For Gober, the image endures, he writes, “in my mind as a counterbalance to the mean countenance of these times.” Close by, a lovely drawing of the two men by Kate Wignall, mirroring the old photo. —Bob Nickas