They are some of Henri Matisse's most famous words. “What I dream of, is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter,” the iconic 20th-century painter wrote in 1908. He then compares a successful work of art to a good armchair.

But Hugh Davies, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, evokes those words only to say he doesn't subscribe to that view of art.

“It never appealed to me,” says Davies. “I prefer edgier, darker art.”

This view shouldn't surprise anyone who knows the subject of a book he co-wrote with art historian Sally Yard on Francis Bacon or viewed the coup of an exhibition he assembled in 1999 containing all of Bacon's Pope paintings.

Bacon's images of howling popes, whose source is Velazquez's “Portrait of Pope Innocent X,” might be the quintessential existentialist images of the 20th century. They take a religious figure and turn him into a symbol of anguish.

While Bacon isn't represented in the exhibition from the permanent collection that Davies has assembled, his spirit is. Finding works with a dark mood or edgy tone isn't hard to do.

There's a big example not far from the door, Scottish artist David Mach's “Gargoyle” (1991): a two-headed snarling beast, with male and female features, that sports a sideways chandelier and stands atop a tilted television. It's an update of the grotesque creatures in historical gargoyles.

K.C. ALFRED / Union-Tribune Museum director Hugh Davies is surrounded by William Kentridge's drawings.

K.C. ALFRED / Union-Tribune Rita McBride's 1990 sculpture in rattan, "Toyota," dominates one gallery.

K.C. ALFRED / Union-Tribune David Cerny's wry "Jesus Christ" is on view.

Then, there's the sad sack of a figure, with video head, seemingly pinned down by a chair in Tony Oursler's “Don't Look at Me” (1994), who yells the words of this title at passing viewers, along with other phrases.

“I didn't want this to be about the curator, but it ends up being that in startling ways, even if the works reflects other curators, too,” says Davies, in his office that overlooks a picturesque expanse of the La Jolla shoreline.

The show is called “Weighing and Wanting: 25 Years of Collecting,” and it's the first of two that Davies is assembling. This one emphasizes paintings, prints, drawings, photography and smaller-scale sculptures. He'll organize the second one next year, to be seen in the Jacobs Building downtown, and it will concentrate on installations, a genre that the museum has collected prolifically since the 1980s. The title will be “Attempt to Raise Hell,” after a strong work by Dennis Oppenheim in the collection.

The occasion for both is one that Davies insists on downplaying: his quarter century as director of the museum. The Princeton-trained art historian came here from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst 1983, where he ran the University Art Gallery.

Still, it's worth noting that for museum directors, this is considerable longevity. The norm in the United States is 10 years or less. San Diego has had its share of directors with lengthy tenures: Arthur Ollman led the Museum of Photographic Arts for 23 years (1983-2006) and Martha Longenecker, the founding director of the Mingei International Museum, was its leader for 27 years (1978-2005).

But Davies thinks the right way of marking this anniversary is to downplay the attention to him and put it on the collection itself.

“The collection is what lives on,” he says, alluding to the notion that its importance supersedes that of any single director. And the history and the identity of a museum is more intimately tied to the works it collects than even the buildings it occupies. The MCASD hasn't always been able to keep aspects of its 4,100-plus holdings on view, but now that it has the Jacobs Building, the long range plan is to consistently devote part of its 1001 Kettner Blvd. space to the collection.

Discussing the collection's evolution, Davies invokes the name of Sebastian “Lefty” Adler, who led the museum for a decade before leaving in March 1983.

“When I look at the collection I inherited 25 years ago, I salute him more and more. He had an impeccable eye for minimalist art, which extended to pop, too: Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. My approach, has been all over the map.”

Adler's era is probably the last in which movements dominated contemporary art in any decisive way. His collecting was New York centric, not recognizing that California work was on the rise.

“When I first got here,” says Davies, “I made a list of gaps. Frankly, I was stunned there was nothing in the collection by Ruscha or Alexis Smith.”

Those familiar with the collection will know that Davies has rectified this situation. Those who aren't will see evidence of this view reflected in the show.

Across the way from Mach's sculpture is Alexis Smith's “Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses” (1985). The words in the title aren't original to Smith: They're borrowed from the great wit Dorothy Parker. But that's typical of Smith's work, which creates a collage of culture, both literally and figuratively. The words spill cross two framed images, which in turn become the eyes or glasses (take your pick) on the face of Marilyn Monroe, several feet tall and painted directly on the wall. The entire assemblage means to provoke you to think about what the American archetype of a woman is, in our era or any other.

In another gallery is the museum's best Ruscha painting: “Ace” (1962). It's beautifully painted, thick in texture, the word in the title done with the same painterly bravado as the rest of the canvas. But true to form, it pits wit against visual seduction. The eye revels in its physical form, while the mind registers that Ruscha is both bragging about his abilities and making fun of the artistic ego at the same time.

The Ruscha is surrounded by a good number of works indicative of California's strengths from the '60s on through the '90s. There's one of Craig Kauffman's gorgeous vacuformed plexiglass sculptures from 1968: a simple shape in translucent color hovering on the wall; Vija Celmins' “Eggs” (1964), a painting that affirms how fascinating banal images can be in a canvas; and Manny Farber's lushly colored, complex mix of natural forms and everyday objects, “Batiquitos” (1995).

Davies describes his approach as “all over the map.” But it's all over the map in a quasi-methodical way.

He reveals as much when he refers to one room on view as “the Jesus room.” Conventional Christian art has been mostly moribund in the last century or so, but that doesn't mean artists ignore the subject. There's a photograph by Andres Serrano from the same series that caused such a stir in the 1980s. Remember “Piss Christ”? The example on view is “Ecco Homo” (1988). Then, there's the sculpture by Czechoslovakian artist David Cerny “Jesus Christ” (1993), which looks like a giant version of a ready-to-assemble plastic figurine, still wrapped in plastic.

And Davies does mean for this room of works to be provocative. “Religion is such a negative force. It's been so divisive over the centuries.”

As much as the collection reflects Davies' tenure, he is quick to insist that the show isn't only about his taste: “I hope it's an institutional self-portrait as much as a directorial self-portrait.”

On the audio guide to the show, he has curators past and present talking about works they sought and succeeded in adding to the collection: Toby Kamps on the kinetic sculpture by Martin Kersel (“Twist,” 1993); Madeline Grynsztejn on the Robert Gober wall sculpture (“Drains,” 1990); and Elizabeth Armstrong on a David Reed painting – (“#312-3 (for Ellen Browning Scripps),” 1992, 1996, 1998).

“I feel as if this show, the collection is a record of our exhibition activity, a residue of that. We've bought heavily out of shows.”

Davies regrets that he wasn't able to represent Latin American art better this time around – an area in which the collection has grown dramatically. But much of the work he would have wanted to include is on the road, in the touring version of its collection exhibition, “TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art.”

As for the title of this show, “Weighing and Wanting,” it captures the very process of collecting, he says, wanting more things than an institution can necessarily acquire and weighing one against another.

This title derives from an installation of works by South African William Kentridge, richly rendered charcoal and pastel drawings that have been transformed into a powerful film. The museum gave him his first American solo exhibition, a prescient move, given his rise to international fame in the years since that 1998 presentation. It's also a prime example of a terrific purchase made from a show.

Sifting through numerous works – the museum has added about 2,000 in the last quarter century – has prompted Davies to take stock of how the collection has evolved in the last quarter century.

“It's an improbably strong collection for a city this young,” he asserts.

Having said that, he doesn't expect that a viewer will take to everything, even in one collection show.

“If you like everything you see here, you're probably not looking hard enough. But I do think there is literally something for everyone.”