By reshuffling the extensive deck of its permanent collection, the Museum of Modern Art has come up with “Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities.” The title of this show invokes those princely cabinets whose collections of corals, pearls, and two-headed calves were the original seedlings of the museum as we know it today. Curated by Sarah Suzuki, an assistant curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, MoMA’s new show contains 130 drawings, sculptures, multiples, photographs, and many other works by more than 60 artists of the past century. The common thread of the objects on view is an affection, even an appetite, for strangeness, for weirdness for its own sake. With all these images of insects, bats, and skeletons, it is surely appropriate that the show will run past Halloween.

The delectatio morosa, or the delight in all that is gruesome and weird, has been a perennially recurring option for Western artists, one that has been available in varying degrees of prominence and abeyance since remote antiquity. This mood plays upon that part of the human psyche that senses the shadow of night at the hour of noon, that feels the chill of winter on a summer’s day, and that perceives the proximity of death even in the most robust acts of vitality. It is an anti-Classical and anti-rational sentiment. Sophocles has no use for it, but Euripides surely does. There is little place for it in the painters of the High Renaissance, but it is abundantly evident in the artists of Mannerism and the Baroque. Closer to home, it is entirely alien to the spirit of the Impressionists and the Abstract Expressionists, but, as the MoMA show demonstrates, it is the stock-in-trade of the Symbolists, of their successors the Surrealists, and of any number of our Postmodern contemporaries.

The exhibition engages several roughly conceived themes, such as the repetition of bats or eyeballs in the works in question. Ms. Suzuki is playing a curator’s game, the premise and point of which is that something of consequence has been accomplished if one can bring together two or more seemingly disparate works and discern some underlying and unsuspected formal connection between them. You can positively taste the curatorial triumphalism in her decision to set side by side Louise Bourgeois’s “Girl Falling, state III” and Paul Klee’s “Aged Phoenix,” both of which exhibit bulbous and misshapen creatures with kindred silhouettes. Whether such pairings uncover anything more than curatorial machismo, however, is another question.

It is probably a wiser strategy to filter-feed your way through this entertaining hodgepodge, assimilating whatever takes your fancy and rejecting all the rest. Odilon Redon, one of the most peculiar artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries and a recurring guest at recent MoMA exhibitions, is represented by a number of oddments, among them an airborne eyeball shaped like a hot-air balloon. There are also works by so-called outsider artists such as Howard Finster and Bill Traylor, the former represented by the depiction of an imaginary city, the latter by the image of a yellow chicken. A very different work, but subtly affecting, is Lucian Freud’s image of a dead monkey from 1950, rendered with the crisp literalism that characterized the artist’s style in his youth. It is far more rewarding than the bombastic impastos of his more recent works.

Among the pieces on display, there are a few very pleasant surprises. Among these are four black-and-white photographs by the Spanish-born Joan Fontcuberta, in which are portrayed bizarrely confected plant forms mixed with animal tissue and bones and photographed in all the retinal clarity of Edward Weston and Robert Mapplethorpe.

As striking in their simplicity are Nicolas Lampert’s photographic collages “Locust Tank” and “Praying Mantis Crane,” which depict the disquieting hybrid of an insect, with its intricate exoskeleton, and a piece of Industrial Age ordnance resembling a tank or a crane. The resulting images possess the instant rightness that one associates with such earlier masters of subversive collage as John Heartfield.

Finally, there are several works by the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos. Given the life-size and rather pedophilic sculptures for which this team is better known, it is surprising to find that they actually have some sense of draftsmanship, as manifested in several collaborative “exquisite corpse” drawings. In this reprise of an old Surrealist game, a sheet of paper is folded and each artist takes turns delineating an area of it that continues the previous artist’s work, but without the other contributions being unveiled until the entire page is covered. The freshness of the drawing suggests that, if they set their minds to it, the Chapman brothers might just be artists after all.

Through November 10 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).