The preoccupation of collecting works of art is probably more widespread at the present than it has been at any time before. Significant collections of modern art are numerous and continue to expand even at this period of five and six digit prices. Art has become popular and even if diamonds are still a girl's best friend, Picasso turns out to be just as sound an investment.

Art collecting, however, was once an institution of another character. That era which produced the collection of Pierpont Morgan is gone forever. It was a period in which a taste for art came hand-in-hand with a quaint, baroque conception known as "objects d'art," a period surviving more than one generation and producing a few diversified and immense collections. Such a phenomenon is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Boston, the Frick collection of New York, and even, to some extent, the still inaccessible treasures of that formidable eccentric, Alfred Barnes of Philadelphia.

Perhaps most remarkable in the case of Morgan is the refinement of taste which produced so intimate a collection, no less fine for its subdued key. So grotesque an aesthetic faux paus as the acquisitions of the William Randolph Hearst dynasty, or even as sincere but visionless an affair as the John Ringling Museum testifies to how far wrong the best intentioned affluence can go. But J. Pierpont Morgan, caring not at all for magnitude, sought quality alone.

The exhibition, a traveling presentation of some of the collection's finest examples, celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Morgan Library in New York. Here is one of those exquisite philanthropies made possible by a successful application of the philosophy that the public be damned.

The exhibit, which is divided into three general categories, drawings, illuminations and manuscripts, reflects the mature judgment of a man whose love for collecting per se began in his teens with the pursuit of autographs. The drawings include one of the few fourteenth century drawings to be found in this country, and a superb one at that. Here are works by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, Brueghel, Durer, and a little gem by Poussin, all of which are exquisite draughtsmanship in the highest sense of the word.

The illuminations, medieval illustrations in book form, are, perhaps, most welcome, since it is these one ordinarily has least opportunity to see. Important canvases in private collections usually find their way to loan exhibitions, but such treasures as these, difficult to exhibit, rarely get a chance to circulate. Done throughout Europe at a time when art and life were by no means considered independent entities, these subtle masterpieces of the late middle ages and early renaissance possess the virtue of being eternally modern.

The manuscripts, not quite art for art's sake or literature for literature's sake, seem to epitomize the joy of collecting. A Gutenberg Bible, the original manuscripts of Keats' Endymion, Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and Pope's Essay on Man, among other works, have traveled about the country with the drawings and illuminations in this magnificent and unconventional exhibition which circulate, to a wider audience, J.P. Morgan's gift to the public.