Applied to New York exhibits, the term “must-see” is relative. Artists, to be true to themselves, only need to see shows that will feed them in their own studios. Everything else is icing. One abstract painter I know has yet to walk through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stupendous New Greek and Roman Galleries. For most of us, however, choosing what to see is increasingly difficult, as New York museums produce more and more first-rate or unusual exhibitions, and galleries mount more museum-quality shows.

This season, even if you were to see only the blockbuster exhibits at the big three venues — the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art — your calendar would be pretty full. But before we get to what is coming this fall, let’s recap which museum shows are already up and running.

It is your last chance to see “Richard Pousette-Dart,” the Guggenheim’s small but wonderful retrospective of the New York School abstract painter. It closes September 25. Currently under way are the Brooklyn Museum’s large group survey “Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art”; the Asia Society Museum’s mid-career retrospective “Zhang Huan: Altered States,” of Chinese performance artist and sculptor Zhang Huan; “The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art From the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection,” at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, and the Bronx Museum’s survey of Cuban-Dominican mixed-media artist Quisqueya Henríquez.

Two “must-see” exhibits are the Metropolitan Museum’s astounding “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a staggering behemoth of a show boasting 239 paintings, and “Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a beautiful and surprising mixed bag of mid-20th century art.

Two major landscape shows also recently have gone on view. The Brooklyn Museum’s “Brushed With Light: American Landscape Watercolors From the Collection” features 80 works by Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, ThomasEakins, andMaurice Prendergast, among others. The Jewish Museum’s “Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country” comprises approximately 50 paintings and works on paper by the French master. Drawn primarily from New York City-area private collections, the exhibit presents us with many works that have rarely been on public view. Two fascinating and very different though interrelated shows, “Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer,” a four–decade retrospective of the innovative contemporary German lighting designer (b. 1932), and “Piranesi as Designer,” an examination of the design and influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), both opened Friday at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has recently opened the shows “Danny Lyon: Montage, Film, and Still Photography,” a survey of the American documentary photographer (b. 1942), and “Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford,” an exhibition of the Los Angeles multimedia artist who, born in 1961, collages and reworks advertising posters from his neighborhood. And opened last week at the Noguchi Museum is “Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi,” an exhibition — comprising 85 works of furniture, interior-and-industrial design objects, drawings, and photographs — that explores the collaboration between the two artists, especially in terms of their hybrid Japanese/Western Modernist furniture.

Roughly half of this season’s major exhibits are under way. Still, there are a number of important shows and events to come, including the reopening of the new New Museum of Contemporary Art, on December 1, in its brand new building at 235 Bowery. Its inaugural show, “Unmonumental,” will explore the art of assemblage. “Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard,” which opens September 27 at the Morgan Library and Museum, comprises 20 never-before-exhibited letters (many of them illustrated) written by van Gogh to Bernard between 1887 and 1889. It also includes more than 20 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by the two artists. The Morgan is also mounting “Drawing Connections: Baselitz, Kelly, Penone, Rockburne, and the Old Masters.” The exhibit, which brings together contemporary and old master drawings, opens October 12. Half of the show’s approximately 50 drawings will be works from the Morgan’s permanent collection. The other half will be responses to those works, which were chosen by the four contemporary artists.

The Museum of Modern Art is bringing us “Georges Seurat: The Drawings” (opens October 28). Comprising more than 135 works, mostly conté drawings, as well as oil sketches and paintings, it will be the first comprehensive survey, in almost 25 years, of the artist’s luminous and mysterious works on paper. MoMA is also mounting a survey of the American sculptor Martin Puryear (b. 1941), which opens November 4, as well as the show “Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings” (opens December 16), which will include approximately 75 prints from between the 1940sand’80sbytheBritishpainter (b. 1922). And MoMA is putting together an exhibition of approximately 200 works from Latin American artists who have entered the collection over the last decade. Titled simply “New Works From Latin America,” the show opens on November 21.

“Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” a retrospective of the artist who has made a career out of the black paper cutout, is opening at the Whitney Museum of American Arton October 11. Also at the Whitney this fall is “Lawrence Weiner: As Far As the Eye Can See,” a retrospective of one of the granddaddies of conceptual art (opens November 15).

The International Center of Photographyis mounting “Thisis War! Robert Capa at Work” (opens September 25). The Guggenheim’s “Richard Prince: Spiritual America,” a survey of the conceptual/ Pop artist/photographer opens on September 28; and also at the Guggenheim is “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945,” the first survey dedicated to the story of photography in that region between the two World Wars (opens October 12).

Other promising shows include the New York Public Library’s “Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road” (opens November 9); the Frick Collection’s “Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780),” an exhibit devoted to one of the French Enlightenment’s most inventive and innovative illustrators (opens October 30), and the Asia Society Museum’s “The Arts of Kashmir.” Comprising over 130 objects from the Second to the 20th centuries, it will be the first major exhibition devoted to its subject.

But the Metropolitan Museum of Art continues to set the benchmark for New York museums. This fall, besides the two blockbusters already mentioned, the Met is opening a whole slew of new or renovated galleries, spaces, and exhibitions: The New Gallery for Modern and Contemporary Photography (opens September 25); the new Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education (opens October 23); the newly renovated and reinstalled Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts (reopens October 30); the New Galleries for Oceanic Art and the New Gallery for Art of Native North America (open November 14), and the expanded, renovated Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries (reopens December 4).

To top it off — along with major shows of Central African art (opens October 2); ancient Egyptian metal statuary (opens October 16); Modern photography, and rare British photographs from paper negatives (both open September 25) — the Met is mounting “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor” (opens October 17); and “The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece” (opens October 30). A lavish survey of 17th-century European tapestry, “Threads of Splendor” is the long-awaited sequel to the monumental 2002 show “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence.” “The Gates of Paradise” features three of the narrative panels — Adam and Eve; Jacob and Esau; and David and Goliath — and four figures from the surrounding frame of Ghiberti’s masterful gilded bronze doors of the east portal of the Florence Baptistery (1425–52).

If you cannot make up your mind about which “must-see” show to see this fall, just go to the Met. No matter which way you travel — toward ancient Egyptian statuary, African sculpture, Baroque tapestries, or Dutch paintings — you are bound to enter one set of paradisiacal gates or another.