The cultural artifact that most epitomizes the risqué, louche Weimar Republic on the brink of catastrophe is not even German. Trumping the operas of Brecht and Weill, the fiction of Alfred Döblin, the caustic drawings of George Grosz — in the popular imagination of the English-speaking world at least — is “Cabaret.”

The lyricist of the duo that also brought the world “Chicago,” “Woman of the Year,” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” was Fred Ebb, who worked with composer John Kander. From the time he began his research for “Cabaret,” and with the proceeds of its stage and movie success, Ebb became an avid collector of German and Austrian Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) drawings. He died in 2004, leaving 43 works to the Morgan. “From Berlin to Broadway” opens to the public tomorrow.

With Ebb’s bequest, these Austro-German drawings became the backbone of the Morgan’s burgeoning modern holdings. Marking a departure from the medieval bias of its founder, J. Pierpont Morgan, and as if to aspire to the modernism of its Renzo Piano extension, the museum has set the 20th century as its new collecting focus. Isabelle Dervaux, who organized the Ebb exhibition and wrote its elegant, informative catalog, was recruited as their first modernist curator in 2005.

Ms. Dervaux has divided the show into three sections, reflecting the historic range of Ebb’s collection. The first features examples of classic German Expressionists of the years before World War I, with a concentration on the Brücke (Bridge) group that included Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Next, attention turns to the Vienna of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and the artist Ebb collected in the greatest depth, with eight drawings, Egon Schiele.

And finally, back to Berlin and the aftermath of defeat in World War I, the epoch of “Cabaret”: opening with Grosz in his Dada period and culminating with Max Beckmann’s allegories of exile, drawn in the New World after World War II.

While Ebb responded to the urban, satirical, excoriating visions of the Brücke group, absent from his collection is the other side of the German Expressionist movement, the more mystically inclined, landscape-oriented group Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider. The closest he comes to nature is Mueller’s “Landscape With Trees and Water” (c. 1923), an atypically lush, bucolic view of nature for this artist best known for his primitive, angular nudes set in landscapes.

Born in New York City and raised in the Depression era, Ebb had little time for the pastoral. On the one occasion when he visited his writing partner in the latter’s country house, Mr. Kander recounts in a foreword to the catalog, he took a bus back to the city the same afternoon. He expressed his sentiment in the lyrics for “The Act”: “Sties and stables sure are smelly / Let me sniff some kosher deli / Brightly lit by pretty city lights.” In “Cabaret,” a trip to the country toward the end of the book exposes the protagonists to a fascist fervor they had missed in the decadent, hedonistic cosmopolis.

The Expressionists and, later, the Neue Sachlichkeit artists developed a vocabulary and iconography to convey the speed, energy, and alienation of the impersonal modern city. Kirchner’s “Figures on a Busy Street” (1914) captures both the panache and claustrophobia of a crowded crossroads with frenetic pencil lines and loose watercolor strokes that catch the edges of posturing pedestrians and ostentatious motorcars. Otto Dix sends up social and economic polarization in “We Want Bread” (1923) with a motley party of bourgeois living it up in a café while demonstrators march past. The revelers include cruelly satirical figures — a grinning, bloated, bald cigar smoker, a heaving bosomed matron, a flashy guy in a loud jacket. The latter has pronounced racial features unlikely to endear him to the grotesque monocled gent at the next table, who is sporting a swastika button (this was the year of the Munich Putsch).

Ebb’s affection for Jeanne Mammen, two of whose drawings he owned, reflects an unsentimental view of romance. “The Joy of Nature” (c. 1930), sarcastically titled, has a couple on a park bench. Here, and even more blatantly in “Café Reimann” (c. 1931), it is clear that the parties would rather be anywhere else. Mammen showed happier couples with her lesbian scenes, where her own heart lay.

The collection boasts several scenes of performers and musicians, as befits their owner’s interest. Nolde’s “Conferencier” (c. 1910–11) is unusually urban and contemporary for an artist best known for his primitive figures and violent celebrations of nature. (A conférencier is a master of ceremonies, a key character in “Cabaret.”) Grosz’s “Musicians” (1932) is a masterful watercolor, the color soaking the page louchely as a guitar-strumming woman grins through violet mascara and a toothy, vermillion mouth.

The majority of Ebb’s works are single figures. Ludwig Meidner’s self-portrait in brush and ink shows an intense, perhaps anguished man deep in thought, his chin sunk on an oversized limp hand. The hands, almost as much as the eyes, were the Expressionists’ windows on the soul. The small-breasted, unidealized girl in Kokoschka’s “Reclining Female Nude” (c. 1911–12) places a weirdly gnarled hand on her brow — the hand reads like an animal or exotic plant. Schiele’s “Standing Boy With Hands on Chest” (1910) has the blank face in shadow, all feeling and presence left to the massively scale-inflated extremities, where the fingers are at once tensed and spread. “Frau Dr. H” (1910) has a pretty, if determined, face (the eye sockets, below the brows, sexily accented in white) and slender figure, but the hands that creep up to her throat are like roots that have a sinister life of their own. The atypically elegant, charm-filled, wistful “Portrait of a Young Man (Erich Lederer)” (1913) significantly hides the hands, one behind the head, the other pocketed.

Curiously, the image chosen for the poster and catalog cover is Karl Hubbuch’s “The Film Star Spends Two Minutes in Her Parents’ Garden” (c. 1932), which is far from the most accomplished work in the collection. It is raucous and saucy in its illustrative way, however, depicting a scantly clad young beauty adjusting her makeup while seated in a petitbourgeois garden with shabby neighbors gawking through the chain-link fence. The drawing has less eroticism and energy than the drawing of a prostitute dressed as a school mistress from the same hand seen recently in the Metropolitan Museum’s “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s.” But the film star image, with its clash of new money and timeless poverty, offers a wry statement about celebrity and glamour and the herd instinct these bring out. The dull faces in the crowd are left in no doubt about the metaphysical truth of what they witness: “Money makes the world go ’round.”

April 20 to September 2 (225 Madison Ave., between 36th and 37th streets, 212-685-0008).