Anumber of New York museum exhibitions this fall focus on aspects of Modernism. Picasso, without whom modern art — if it had survived at all — would have taken an entirely different path, is central to three shows: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spectacular “Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde” (until January 7), the Whitney’s “Picasso and American Art,” which opens September 28, and, opening November 17, the Guggenheim’s “Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History.”

“Cézanne to Picasso” is an astounding show. The French dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) launched the careers of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, the Nabis, and the Fauves. He also published artists’ books and promoted Renoir, Redon, Bonnard, van Gogh (posthumously), and Gauguin. Among the masterpieces in the exhibition are a cache of Cézannes and portraits of Vollard by Bonnard, Picasso, Renoir, and Cézanne, as well as hand-painted ceramics and illustrated books.

The Whitney’s “Picasso and American Art,” although it purports to “celebrate Picasso’s dramatic impact on the course of 20th-century American art,” based solely on the list of artists represented, is suspect. The show of approximately 165 objects will bring us rarely seen works by Picasso and paintings and sculpture by the American masters Arthur Dove, David Smith, Marsden Hartley, and Man Ray, but the pairing of his art with works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns (artists who have nothing to do with the aims and talents of Picasso), suggests that the exhibition really has no interest in the School of Paris and its importance in postwar America. “Picasso and American Art,” whose predictable trajectory takes us through Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, will be most likely another missed opportunity to focus on Picasso’s real and continuing impact on American artists. Of course, we will have to wait and see.

“Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso” is a major exhibition that, organized thematically, will focus on the key Spanish artists of the last five centuries: El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, and Miró. The one blaringly weak link in this monumentally promising lineup is Salvador Dalí, who is also counted by the Guggenheim as a “great master.”

Picasso may have been born a Spaniard, but his importance to French painting is immeasurable. He never visited America. Like most fin de siècle artists, Picasso was drawn to Paris. Another show at the Met focuses on the allure of the City of Lights at the end of the 19th century. James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer are among the 37 American painters whose some 100 works will be featured in the exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1860–1900” (opens October 24), which will focus on works influenced by French art, especially Impressionism, created by Americans in Paris.

For a show that looks at American painters, this time on native soil, check out “Luminist Horizons: The Art and Collection of James A. Suydam,” currently on view until December 31 at the National Academy. It features 19th-century landscape paintings by Suydam, John F. Kensett, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church.

Another exhibition opening this fall focuses on the impact of a particular time and place on art. “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s,” which starts at the Met on November 14 and looks at portraits produced by 10 painters, including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, during the short-lived and politically tumultuous Weimar Republic (1919–1933).

Also at the Met will be the exhibition “Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall — An Artist’s Country Estate” (opens November 21). Laurelton Hall, built by Tiffany between 1902 and 1905 on more than 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound, was more than an elaborate dream house for the designer. It was a work of art and an Art Nouveau time capsule. Although it was destroyed by fire in 1957, many of the objects — windows, glassware, ceramics, enamels, paintings — all created by Tiffany, were salvaged, and will be featured in the exhibition.

The Whitney is mounting another Modernist show, “Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World” (opens November 2). László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was one of the most experimental and influential artists teaching at the Bauhaus. He invented the “camera-less” photogram and photomontage, as well as, arguably, installation art. Josef Albers (1888–1976), though less interesting as an artist, is known primarily for his color theory and his abstract “Homage to the Square” paintings. Comprising more than 170 works of abstract art, the first half of the show will be devoted to work created in Europe. The second section will feature art produced after the two artists immigrated to America where they both took up influential teaching posts.

Returning to its roots this fall, the Museum of Modern Art is bringing us the small show “Édouard Manet and ‘The Execution of Maximilian'” (opens November 5). The Emperor Maximilian, crowned by the French government and sent to Mexico, was abandoned and, subsequently, executed in Mexico by firing squad in 1867. By 1869, Manet had completed four paintings and one lithograph on the subject, all of which will be on view at MoMA.

And returning to its medieval roots this fall, the Met is mounting “Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture” (opens September 26), an exhibition of more than 80 sculpture heads, half from the Met’s collection, from the third century through the early 1500s.

Three promising exhibitions are being offered at the Frick: “Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting,” which opens on October 3 and will reunite two Cimabue panels; “Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804): A New Testament” (opens October 24), which will reunite 60 of the original 313 large drawings from the Venetian’s New Testament cycle; and “Masterpieces of European Painting From the Cleveland Museum of Art,” comprising 13 paintings, including works by Caravaggio, El Greco, Carracci, Velázquez, Poussin, Jacques Louis David, and J.M.W. Turner (opens November 8).

The Morgan Library and Museum is mounting “Fragonard and the French Tradition” (opens October 13), a selection of drawings by Fragonard and his contemporaries; as well as the shows “Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966” (opens September 29), the first comprehensive show devoted to Mr. Dylan’s formative years; and “Mozart at 250,” a selection of the composer’s music manuscripts (opens October 13).

“Saul Steinberg: Illuminations,” which opens at the Morgan on December 1, is among a broader grouping of exhibitions dealing with cartoons and comics. The Jewish Museum, in conjunction with the Newark Museum, is mounting two shows: “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics” and “Masters of American Comics” (both until January 28). Other shows include gallery exhibitions and the Studio Museum’s “Africa Comics” (opens November 15).

Among the numerous one-person museum retrospectives of contemporary artists opening this fall is the Whitney’s first full-scale American museum survey of sculptor Kiki Smith (opens November 16), and MoMA’s retrospective of abstract “monochrome panel” painter Brice Marden (opens October 29). Ms. Smith (b. 1954), the daughter of sculptor Tony Smith, is one of the few figurative artists to have become successful in our Post-Modern climate. The retrospective, comprising 125 works from the last 25 years, will certainly put Ms. Smith’s gifts to the test.

Other exhibitions of contemporary art include one-person shows of the late, influential British conceptual, assemblage artist John Latham at P.S. 1 (opens October 22); Annie Leibovitz’s photographs at the Brooklyn Museum (opens October 20), and Sean Scully (one of the current poster boys of abstract painting), which opens September 26 at the Met.

It is no surprise that, with technology changing so quickly and photography selling so well at the auction houses, shows of photography are increasing. “Ecotopia,” the Second Triennial of Photography and Video, is on view until January 7 at ICP. “FOTO,” a survey of contemporary photography from Denmark, is on view until November 11 at Scandinavia House. “New Photography 2006,” featuring the work of Jonathan Monk, Barbara Probst, and Jules Spinatsch, opens tomorrow at MoMA. The Met is mounting “New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori” (until December 10); and the New York Public Library is offering “Where Do We Go From Here? The Photo League and Its Legacy (1936–2006)” (opens October 27).

Contemporary Asian art shows worth noting this fall include “One Way or Another: Asian-American Art Now” at the Asia Society (until December 10); “Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century” at the Japan Society (opens September 29); and the China Institute’s two-part exhibition “Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art (open September 28 and December 13, respectively).” Other exhibitions that should be well worth seeing include the New York Public Library’s “Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan” (opens October 20); “I See No Stranger: Early Sikh Art and Devotion” at the Rubin Museum of Art (until January 29), and “Gilded Splendor: Treasures From China’s Liao Empire (907–1175)” (opens October 5).

We should also keep in mind that the newly expanded Bronx Museum is slated to reopen on October 7. (Let’s hope for the best.) And certainly of interest, at least to a select few (in New York this means hundreds if not thousands), will be the specialized exhibitions: “Staircase Masterpieces” — a selection of staircase models, mostly from 19th century France, that explores architectural, design, cabinetry, and structural skills — at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (opens October 6); and, at the New York Public Library,”A Rakish History of Men’s Wear,” the “story of men’s fashion told through its rebels and rakes” (until April 7). A survey of men’s fashion from antiquity to the present — “from tight hose and doublets to codpieces and the wasp-waisted frock coat that preceded the modern suit” — the exhibition should settle once and for all whether the clothes make the man.