Cabinet's Trove: Studies in Curiosity.

Modern museums have their origins in the German wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, collections of objects assembled by European aristocrats that included everything from goblets to unusual biological specimens. The Cabinet at the Frick Collection, a modest space between the gift shop and the stairwell to the bathrooms, doesn't hold the same range of marvels. In ''A Passion for Drawings,'' a show of 10 works on paper, donated by Charles Ryskamp, a former Frick director who created the Cabinet during his tenure in the late 1980s and '90s, functions almost like a wunderkammer, offering a curious window into nature, history and politics. On the biological end is a watercolor by Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840), a Flemish-born artist who published about 2,100 botanical engravings. The watercolor here, of two plum varieties, is a study for an unrealized engraving. What's also interesting about Redoute is how he navigated the vagaries of patronage during a complicated historical period: before the French Revolution he worked for Marie Antoinette; afterward for Empress Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife and a fanatic of roses, Redoute's specialty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]