Lawler is a spy in the house of art, casting sidelong glances at Modernist masterpieces as they wend their way from the pristine white cubes of galleries and the carpeted walls of auction houses to museum storerooms, corporate boardrooms, and private homes around the world. In its exposure of the art world's usually invisible machinery of possession, display, and circulation, Lawler's work fits comfortably within the tradition of institutional critique that began with Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Her effortlessly cool, deliberately neutral images are never cheap shots or tendentious sermons, however, and, as Walker Evans once wrote of Diane Arbus, there is more wonder than sociopolitical conviction in her gaze.

As sometimes happens in photography, Lawler discovered the crux of her entire project serendipitously, when she was granted access to the Connecticut home of Burton and Emily Tremaine, collectors of twentieth-century art, in 1984. Working in available light with a 35mm camera, Lawler unearthed treasures everywhere she looked, such as this decorator's duet between a late Jackson Pollock and the filigree of an eighteenth-century tureen. Simultaneously trenchant and poignant, Pollock and Tureen is a cutting comment laced with the love of an undercover aesthete.