Seeking to expand its own contemporary holdings, Vassar College is wooing the Logan Collection, one of the world’s largest stockpiles of contemporary art. “Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection,” now at Vassar’s Loeb Art Center, showcases 34 works on paper by 27 contemporary artists from the collection of Kent Logan, a retired partner at Montgomery Securities, and his wife Vicki, a 1968 Vassar alumna.

The couple began collecting contemporary art in the early 1990s and quickly amassed more than 900 works by 200 artists, including what they contend is the biggest private cache of contemporary Chinese art in the United States. Though an inflated market has admittedly put a crimp in recent acquisitions, the couple bought more than 100 pieces a year at the height of their shopping. In 2002, they built a 7,300-square-foot kuntshalle on their property in Vail, Colo., to house the inventory.

While the bulk of the collection concentrates on artists of the last 15 years, about one-third dates back to the 1960s. The exhibition catalog tries to project an aura of intellectual engagement onto a styleless hodgepodge of figurative images that, with few exceptions, cluster around a bad-boy urge to stick it to the viewer.

On view are speculative pieces dating mainly from the 1990s to the present, with a sprinkling of predictable brands: Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Bruce Nauman, post-“Sensation” Chris Ofili, and the inevitable Warhol. The Logans have more than 30 Warhols. This one, from 1981, is a lackluster outline drawing that has the look of a cursory tracing from a poster for the 1978 “Superman” movie.

Mel Ramos’s pencil drawing “Study for Dr. Midnight” (1962), slated for donation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the oldest work here. It is also the best, but then Mr. Ramos had Stanley Aschmeir’s dynamic art for DC Comics as a model. Mr. Ramos’s lively draftsmanship leaves one wondering what he might have achieved if he had grown up when Pop art’s moment passed. Of Ms. Yuskavage’s two entries, one is a negligible pastel of a faceless, big-thighed female with a stick for an arm. The other is a disconcertingly beautiful (the execution, not the subject) black-and-white impression of a fembot good-times ninja with impossible breasts. One almost wishes the handling had been trashier.

Post-feminist “examination of the female body” is the posture du jour. Cecily Brown does her bad-girl thing with a slipshod wash drawing of one schoolgirl spanking the bare behind of another. Kim Dingle takes a jab at childhood innocence with “The Nelson: Takedowns and Pinning Combinations (messy shoes).” Her lumpish schoolgirl duo, in Mary Janes and underpants, is locked in a suggestive wrestling hold.

Mr. Nauman’s sketch “Eating Buggers I” (1985) sticks a finger up the nose and into the mouth of a crudely drawn, generic head. It is the rehearsal for a blinking neon wall piece in which a finger flicks back and forth in timed intervals from nostril to mouth. This is schoolyard grossness tarted up as “the use of the human body as a site of curiosity and investigation.” More such sights greet the viewer in Nicola Tyson’s drawing of … not sure, really. “Untitled #67” (1997) looks suspiciously like a hot dog in a tutu or, if your mind works that way, a phallus complete with testicles. Either way, we are prompted to view it as “an evocation of the strength and vulnerability of the human form.”

Mr. Currin is true to type with a grotesquely top-heavy blond bombshell aimed at grown-ups who still daydream about groping Daisy Mae. The refined delicacy of Kurt Kauper’s pencil study of Cary Grant posing nude beside a fireplace belies the common campiness of the subject. It is a tongue-in-cheek excuse for frontal male nudity. Su-en Wong battles racist and sexist stereotypes by exposing herself naked amidst tropical vegetation. This, in plucky defiance of “the role young Asian women play in male fantasy.”

Mr. Ofili’s “Black Grapes” (2004), an Afrocentric riff on Adam and Eve, is the prettiest piece here. Nothing beats gold leaf and red on black for effect. It sports a red frame to emphasize decorative properties borrowed from Chinese lacquer-ware. Yang Lijun’s oversize four-panel scroll in coarse grisaille succeeds better as a political comment on the loss of individuality in Communist China than a work of art that animates the page. Antony Gormley’s blots of burnt chicory running down a male back are idiosyncratic defacements of the torso that could mean anything or nothing.

All the conformist tropes of transgressive fashion are represented; there is a sexual cast to much of the work and an undercurrent of unspecified violence. Overall, the collection reflects the buying habits of an investment connoisseur who understands markets but seems to have little independent sensitivity to art itself.

The Logans emphasize that their collection is a set of ideas, not mere images. They state that the human figure is used only “in a conceptual sense” and advance the term “figurative conceptualism.” It is a rhetorical dodge that discounts the entire history of art. The human figure has always been a conceptual tool. In every age, from the Cycladic to the present, concepts have guided the hand and determined form. The greater the art, the more distinctive its conceptual dimension. What counts is the nature of the shaping idea and the quality of expression.

If the Logans had conceded that, they might have chosen more enduring work. To be fair, this is a small selection from a huge collection. Still, it is enough to suggest a sensibility with a limited life span.

Until June 8 (125 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 845-437-7404).