Before there were tourists, artists were the prime justification for museums. Masterworks from the past were gathered to guide and inspire current practioners, and delighting the hoi polloi was a secondary consideration.

It is heartening, then, to see an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum that investigates the linkage between four living draftsmen and old master drawings, and lets the artists loose in the vaults, so to speak, to pick out treasures. The Morgan invited Georg Baselitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Giuseppe Penone, and Dorothea Rockburne to select masterworks from the museum’s incomparable collections to hang alongside examples of their own drawing. The venture adds new spin to the adage “art for art’s sake.”

At least, that is one way of looking at the arrival of living art in the hallowed halls of a museum steeped in a sense that greatness belongs to the past. Critics of the Morgan’s new identity, its rebranding from plain old Morgan Library to Morgan Library & Museum, would argue that this expansion of remit is dictated by the expansion of plant: The Museum has its soaring, spanking white Renzo Piano Atrium, so it’s time for the art to match its surroundings.

The exhibition is curated by Isabelle Dervaux, the first occupant of the position of curator of modern and contemporary art. She has selected four artists very different from one another, not just in terms of the style and sensibility of their finished work, but also in the ways that they use drawing, and relate to art of the past. The artists were given a hand in the hanging of their sections of the show in a way that makes the installations themselves quite significant. All four are mostly showing resolved drawings that are self-contained works, whereas many of the drawing they in turn have selected are working sketches rather than showpieces.

Mr. Kelly, the first artist one encounters upon entering the gallery, has placed his old masters choices along one wall at right angles to a longer wall displaying his own works. The abstract painter is a consummate stylist whose every gesture is permeated with heightened consideration and refinement. He has what seems an eclectic choice of drawings from Rubens to Matisse, and has chosen a spread of drawings from his own oeuvre. But both formally and conceptually, the implied pairings are as tight and spare as one of his shaped, minimal monochrome canvases.

His first drawing, attributed to Rubens, is of a sleeping lion, dated 1614–15. The lion’s facial features bear an uncanny resemblance, funnily enough, to Mr. Kelly’s own. It echoes to a deathbed drawing of Mr. Kelly’s father, “Allan Kelly, Sr. (After Death)” (1982).

In his drawings (as in his photography), Mr. Kelly explores observation of nature and the environment that is eschewed from his pared-down abstract paintings. The most familiar subject of his graphic works are plant forms, several of which are included here. A delicate, intricate, almost seismographic cluster of lines that denote “Pine Branches II” (1950) form a relationship with Jean-Antoine Watteau’s “Study of a Young Man Seen from the Back” (c. 1717). The Watteau manages to combine disparate speeds, quickly observed in the dash of red chalk that describes his breeches, and meticulously rendered in his cluster of hair. Mr. Kelly’s own drawing combines a similar fusion of ease and precision. A careful yet unfussy “Study for ‘Curve I,'” (1973) relates in its casual care to Matisse’s “Self-Portrait” (1945), which is part of the Morgan’s Thaw Collection.

Like Mr. Kelly, Mr. Penone has a penchant for the spare, quiet, and understated, but his work and presentation are very different. He organizes his selections in three groups with contrastive examples of his own work. Though varied, his drawing techniques are always labor intensive, as are those of most of his chosen old masters. At the same time, though, the values of this artist associated with Arte Povera, the Italian minimal-conceptual group whose name derived from the artists’ preference for humble materials and techniques unassociated with traditional fine art, come across in his tastes and his own practice. “Mountain Landscape with a River, Village and Castle” (c.1525–1569) attributed to the Netherlandish master Pieter Bruegel, is modulated from painstakingly, intricate marks, as is the sturdy, steady “Portrait of the Artist’s Brother Endres” (c. 1518) by Albrecht Dürer. Both are placed in proximity to Mr. Penone’s own highly wrought if numbly illustrative “Study for 15-Year-Old Tree” (1970), an all-over composition of planks of wood and a bare tree trunk inside a shaft.

While the Italian Mr. Penone is drawn toward the expressive containment and strenuous work ethic of the northern tradition, the German Mr. Baselitz expressly rejected the “Gothic stiffness” of Dürer and the German School. The grass is always greener on the other side of the Alps. The German painter rose to international attention in the 1980s with bombastic, awkward, politically and emotionally loaded imagery in the neo-expressionist style. A turning point in his early development occurred in 1964 during a six-month period in Florence where he discovered the mannerists. Making his selection long distance, from photographs, he responded to the fact that the Morgan boasts no fewer than 40 pages by the rare Florentine Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola), and decided to select exclusively from this artist.

The juxtaposition of a work such as Mr. Baselitz’s “A New Type” (1965) and Pamigianino’s “Man Standing Beside a Plinth on which he Rests a Book” (1530s) is a contrast in forms, if not intentions. The German artist is self-consciously crude and ham-fisted, and opts for an almost brutal flattening of the figure, a lack of differentiation between lines denoting foreground and background, and heavy, awkward outlines. The Italian, on the other hand, was willing to sacrifice accuracy to fluidity, subjecting not just the figures but also the space itself to a serpentine sensuality. Where the mannerist and the neo-expressionist find common ground is in the sense that knowingly artificial style conveys its own expressive value or meaning. For Mr. Baselitz, revisiting the style cut short by National Socialism, which, at the same time grew out of the same compost, held a cathartic force in both personal and German renewal.

Where Messrs. Kelly, Penone, and Baselitz relate their own work to old masters in terms, respectively, of form, process, and style, Ms. Rockburne’s selection and self-presentation are based on what could be called a phenomenology of drawing. Her own work has taken its cue from the material properties of paper — what happens when the material is subjected to various procedures. She has found drawings in the Morgan that underscore her thoughts about drawing during different moments of her career. Like Mr. Penone, Ms. Rockburne gives us three case studies of herself and her chosen masters. Big minimal geometric drawings on shaped pages where the line follows folds of the paper, such as “Conservation Class #5” (1973), keep company with a squared-up Tintoretto of a man falling backward in an open, indeterminate space — the sky, perhaps. There is almost a sense of the space being defined by the act of drawing rather than, as would be normal, the other way around. In works reflecting her interests in astronomy, such as the vibrantly colored “The Conjecture” (2007), drippy but dense watercolor is used to impart a sense of bodies moving in different dimensions. The corresponding old master drawings, such as Domenico Beccafumi’s “Head of an Old Man with Open Mouth” (ca. 1529–35) also use the medium to suggest the weight and movement of the head turning in light. And complex relief structures in different paper supports, such as “The Plan of St. Gall” (1988–89) are placed with a study of interlocking hands by Guido Reni, to underscore the artist’s conviction that mannerist abuse of conventional space accounted for her burgeoning fascination with mathematics and astronomy.

Like her three contemporaries, Ms. Rockburne’s own pieces represent a shift, not just in scale, but in essential purpose from the small, exploratory, working drawings of the selected Old Masters. Ironically, self-consciously conceptual modern artists seem less involved in raw visual thinking, in their works on paper, than the artists of the past. Inviting artists to showcase themselves in the company of past treasures is an inventive way both to probe the museum’s inventory and signal ways to add to it.

Until January 6 (225 Madison Ave. at 36th Street, 212-685-0008).