Kasper Collection at the Morgan Library in N.Y.

Tradition, as we know, is conservative. But it's also transformative, in the sense that the new necessarily builds on the old. Picasso and Stravinsky are arguably the most revolutionary of modern artists, yet both of them centrally grounded their careers in classicism. This is not a paradox; it's the way culture enacts and renews itself.

For the past 150 years, another player has joined this game: criticism. The artist synthesizes disparate materials; the critic synthesizes disparate artists. Criticism isn't art, but it is part of the matrix out of which modern art has been produced.

Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Ruskin, Benjamin, Jameson: These names belong to the history of art (and literature) no less than Matisse or Proust. The American Abstract Expressionists didn't need a Clement Greenberg to get them going, but they did need him to help explain to them what they were doing.

Barnes: Collector as critic

Great collectors can serve the same function as great critics. The greatest collector of modern art was Albert Barnes, who may have done as much as anyone to create the tradition of modern painting, the painters themselves not excepted. Barnes was a critic as well as a collector, but in the work he chose to buy and the way he chose to display it— a series of complex choices made over many decades— he created what remains the single most important statement about modern art.

No one like Barnes exists any more, but then there's no one like a Picasso or a Matisse to buy from, either. However, we still have perceptive collectors who know their own minds and have something to say.

One of them is the fashion designer Herbert Kasper. Some 63 drawings and 50 photographs from the Kasper Collection are now on display in the Morgan Library, and the works are not only of high quality but engaged in interesting dialogue with each other.

Juxtaposing centuries

Kasper's collection does what a number of curated exhibitions have done in recent years, in juxtaposing works from different centuries to reveal similarities of trait and taste underneath superficial divergences of style. (Of course, this fashion too owes itself to Barnes, who illustrated his points about the sources of modern art with everything from Greek vases to Old Master paintings to African masks.)

The contrast, in this show, is between mostly Mannerist drawings from the 16th and 17th Centuries, and modern work, with a heavy but by no means exclusive emphasis on photography. Mostly the works are separated by period, but occasionally they are juxtaposed.

Mannerism is the late Renaissance style that came in with the 1520s; Raphael's death in 1520 is a convenient dividing line. It's characterized by flowing lines, elongated figures and an integration of figure and ground that creates spatial tension and dynamism.

Mannerism comes back

The Baroque style that succeeded it would push Mannerism forward in certain respects toward Romanticism, but pull it back in others in ways that would lay the ground for 18th-Century Neoclassicism. These are large generalizations, of course, but Mannerism— long derided in the academies that shaped 19th-Century taste as willfully crude and barbaric beside the divine Raphael— spoke again directly to artists only with the arrival of 20th-Century Expressionism.

This is still the case with German painters such as Baselitz, but the wheel has come around again, and Mannerism is now itself seen as a species of Neoclassicism, albeit one that reflects on the astringencies of mid-period Picasso, Matisse and Léger, as well as Surrealism, whose classicizing component is now easily read in the works of Dali, Chirico, MirÓ³ and others.

All this is to say that the various styles and periods of modern Western art— that is, from the Renaissance forward— continue to play off one another, so that now one facet and now another comes into view. A hundred years ago, Mannerism reflected that spur of Romanticism that would eventuate in Expressionism; today, its abstract and decorative elements speak more to the eclectic Neoclassicism of the present, a pole in our lazily drifting current.

Rise of prints and photography

One of the striking aspects of late Renaissance art was the development of the print. At first prints were used as mass-production replicas of unique works by popular artists, but they soon became an artistic genre in their own right— and, with Rembrandt and Goya, a form capable of the highest artistic achievement.

Photography, the next great advance in mass-produced imagery, followed a similar career in the 19th Century, rapidly becoming one of the fine arts and generating its own alternating cycles of classicism and Romanticism.

The present show doesn't include early prints, but the mixed media arts that now blur the traditional boundaries between drawing, printing and photography have created a shifting iconography that directly or indirectly references Old Master themes and imagery.

What category for Kiefer?

"Drawing" is in fact a highly elastic category these days, in which the union of hand and paper by means of pen or brush is often modified if not replaced by various applied materials, collage elements and photochemical processes. A case in point is Anselm Kiefer's Leonardo di Pisano, a large and impressive work that could as easily be called a photograph as a drawing, and really (like much of Kiefer's work) resists categorization altogether.

Yet the Old Master drawings— relatively few in number, but choice— remind us not only of the wonders attainable with pen and brush, but of the rapid evolution of technique no less than style in the 16th Century. Chalks and charcoals were added to the mix, and a variety of effects, from cross-hatching to sfumato, gave depth and texture.

Bandinelli's radical experiments

Admirers of the Mona Lisa will be struck by Baccio Bandinelli's highly wrought Head of a Woman Wearing a Ghirlanda, with its air of pensive merriment, and even those familiar with Bandinelli's radical, almost Cubistic experiments will find surprise in its deeply expressive naturalism.

Highly finished drawings— presentation pieces— became more common in the 16th Century, as drawing came to be valued as in art in itself, and there are excellent ones here; but also throwaway gems like Taddeo Zuccaro's profile of a seated man, perhaps an apostle, with half-sketched figures in the background, or the sheet of Veronese studies for The Consecration of David, with its effortlessly teeming life.

From the 17th Century, we leap without pause to the 20th, where among the modern masters (Picasso, Leger, MirÓ³, Dubuffet, etc.) Matisse's Large Nude (1935), all sinuosity in black ink, has pride of place for me, and more contemporary artists such as Jenny Holzer and Vik Muniz incorporate photographic elements.

This leads to the second display room, entirely given over to modern photographs that show themselves in dialogue with hand-modeled works. There are, indeed, "crossover" artists such as Adam Fuss who are represented in both spaces, and give the exhibit, for all its disparate styles and elements, a sense of fluid continuum. Of course, this placement represents the curator's eye as much as the collector's.

This is a superbly designed show, and, for the connoisseur, one not to be missed.