Before you set your sights on the future, don’t let the present pass you by. The Metropolitan Museum of Art currently gives us plenty of reasons to forego those spring walks through the park and, instead, to take in nature of a different kind. “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions,” which closes May 11, and “Gustave Courbet,” which closes May 18, both offer some of the most spectacular collections of landscape paintings available in New York.

Later this spring, in what will surely be an embarrassment of riches, the Met is mounting “Medieval and Renaissance Treasures From the Victoria and Albert Museum” (May 20–August 17), which will feature a number of works never before seen in New York. London’s V&A, now undergoing extensive renovations, has one of the finest collections of European decorative arts. Included in this compact, stellar loan exhibition will be the Carolingian ivory cover of the “Lorsch Gospels,” a late-Gothic ivory corpus by Giovanni Pisano, as well as Donatello’s bronze “Winged Putto With Fantastic Fish.” If you still aren’t convinced that photography is art, plan to check out the Met’s “Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840–1940” (June 3–September 1), which will present us with roughly a gross of photographs taken by a baker’s dozen of the world’s greatest artists with a camera. The show will feature 13 photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Nadar, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï. It promises to be the exhibition against which all other photography shows in New York this summer (as well as all other photographers) should be measured.

Also opening at the Met is “J.M.W. Turner” (July 1–September 21), the largest retrospective of the artist’s work ever to be mounted in America. Turner’s wildly stormy oils and watercolors are the British spring that fed French Impressionism. It is high time we were able to see more of this 19th-century master on this side of the pond. The French-born sculptor Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911) is being honored with a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum (June 27–September 28). Generally, her sculptures (including her large spindly “Spiders”) do better out-of-doors, especially in nature, where they transcend their all-too-easy roles as science fiction creatures. There should be something in this show for everyone.

In honor of the ascendency of Japanese pop-culture-commodity-kitsch, the Brooklyn Museum is purportedly going all out with its 18,500-square-foot retrospective of Takashi Murakami (Japanese, b. 1962). “© Murakami” (April 5–July 13), which will span his entire career, will pay tribute to a leading contemporary artist who makes toys and cartoons cum art.

The Met, not to be outdone, is mounting its own, though smaller, shrine to kitsch, “Jeff Koons on the Roof,” taking place April 29–October 26, weather permitting. The Met is also putting on “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” (May 7–September 1), the Costume Institute’s, ahem, “exploration [of] the symbolic and metaphorical associations between these fictional characters and fashion” — whatever that means. As with much of the Costume Institute’s recent fare, the show will probably be another super-distraction for the super-rich.

If you want the understated opposite of Messrs. Koons and Murakami, something more along the line of sublime simplicity, take in the Bard Graduate Center’s exhibition, “Out of This World: Shaker Design, Past, Present, and Future” (through June 15). “In 1774, elected Shaker leader Mother Ann Lee emigrated from England to America with a small band of followers,” states a press release for the show. The Shaker community, which practiced the virtues of “purity, pacifism, tolerance, and the equality of the sexes,” reached its apogee of about 6,000 members in 1840. The show explores the full range of the Shaker lifestyle and of Shaker-made products — furniture, woodenware, ceramics, textiles, and packaging.

The Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with P.S. 1 and the Public Art Fund, is mounting “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson” (April 20–June 30), an exhibition, by the artist whose man-made series, “The New York City Waterfalls” (2008), will take place in the city this summer. The MoMA show, which will include installations that merge landscape, atmosphere, sculpture, and photography, will cover the last 15 years of the artist, who was born in Copenhagen in 1967.

The Morgan Library & Museum has two promising shows on their spring schedule: “Illuminating the Medieval Hunt” (April 18–August 10) will feature nearly 53 miniatures from Gaston Phoebus’s magnificent hunting manuscript, “Le Livre de la Chasse” (Paris, c. 1407), which will be disbound temporarily while the manuscript undergoes conservation. And “Philip Guston: Works on Paper” (May 2–August 31), the first retrospective of the artist’s drawings in 20 years, will offer us approximately 75 works from the mid-1940s through 1980, the year of Guston’s death. The show promises to have a concentration from his crucial periods, including works from between the 1940s and the mid-1950s (which many, including myself, consider to be his best). Also on offer is the Jewish Museum’s “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976” (May 4–September 21),which will feature 60 works of Postwar art.

One of the great treats of the season most certainly will be the Frick’s show, “The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain, 1710–50” (March 25–June 27). The royal manufactory of Meissen was established in 1710, outside of Dresden, only two years after the more than 1,000-year-old Chinese formula for manufacturing porcelain was discovered in the West. The Arnhold Collection is one of the greatest private holdings of Meissen porcelain, and the show will present approximately 100 stellar pieces — 100 good reasons to avoid the crowds and the pollen in Central Park.