There is one New York museum show this summer for which you should desert your beach house in the Hamptons, your cottage on Cape Cod, even your Tuscan villa: “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams: His Art and His Textiles,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (opens June 23). Normally, I am not one to heap accolades on an exhibition before it opens, but everything is in place to make this show one of the great events of the season. I have never seen a bad Matisse, and “The Fabric of Dreams” will have approximately 70 paintings and drawings by the master, displayed alongside roughly 35 examples from Matisse’s personal collection of fabrics, costumes, and carpets.

Matisse was born into a family – indeed, a whole region, of master weavers – and he collected luxury textiles from around the world throughout his life. The show’s selections will range from Parisian couture gowns to African wall hangings to Turkish robes, a collection that should provide us not only with gorgeous textiles but also with insights into Matisse’s taste, inspiration, and working methods. Never before exhibited, these are the textiles Matisse loved and used for inspiration in his paintings, drawings, and cutouts, as well as in his stained-glass windows and vestments for the Matisse Chapel.

Also at the Met this summer are two recently opened ongoing exhibitions: “Chanel,” an uneven selection of more than 50 designs and accessories from Coco Chanel’s maison de couture; “Tony Oursler at the Met: ‘Studio’ and ‘Climax,’ “a two-work installation, one of which is based on Gustave Courbet’s “The Artist’s Studio”; the beautiful “Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands” (northeast of Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands were Paul Gauguin’s escape); and “John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker.”

Also at the Met is “All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860,” a show of approximately 90 works (May 24). Fenton, an Englishman, produced some of the most spectacular and celebrated photographs – landscapes, royal portraits, still lifes – of the mid-19th century. Opening there in September will be two shows that look well worthwhile: “The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt” (September 13) and “Prague, the Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437” (September 20), a lavish show of some 200 panel paintings, sculpture, manuscripts, textiles, and gold work, celebrating the reign of King Charles IV.

At the same time as the Fenton exhibition, another major retrospective of photography, “Friedlander,” a mid-1950s-to-the-present survey of the photographs of Lee Friedlander (b. 1934), will open at the Museum of Modern Art (June 5). Mr. Friedlander has taken more than 60,000 photographs, many of them straightforward American documentary, and this show will present us with roughly 500 of them. Another photography show at MoMA, “Mount St. Helens: Photographs by Frank Gohlke”(June 29), will present roughly 45 photographs by Mr. Gohlke (b. 1942) of the devastation wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

But the first blockbuster exhibition at the museum since its reopening last November will be “Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne and Pissarro 1865-1885” (June 26). A show of approximately 90 paintings (grouped in pairs), the much-anticipated show will, for the first time, present the two painters in the context of their 20-year artistic collaboration, when they worked side by side in Pontoise and Auvers in France.

Two other MoMA shows open on June 29. “New Work/New Acquisitions” will be an exhibition, at various locations throughout the museum, of approximately 20 works of art acquired since 2001. “2005 Young Architects Program Proposals” is an exhibition at MoMA, in affiliation with its younger sister institution, Long Island City’s P.S.1, of the proposed designs by this year’s five finalists, who each proposed a building project for the courtyard at P.S.1. You can see Xefirotarch’s winning proposal at P.S.1 itself.

Currently open at the Guggenheim is the retrospective “Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim.” Rebay (1890-1967), an accomplished abstract painter, was the Guggenheim’s first director. The show will be fleshed out with works by her colleagues and friends Jean Arp, Vasily Kandinsky, and Kurt Schwitters, among others. It will be followed by “Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints” (July 1). This ill-conceived show will attempt to explore the dialogue between Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic nudes with 16th-century Mannerist prints. The comparison can only, regardless of the superficial connections between them, illuminate the shortcomings of Mapplethorpe.

The Guggenheim’s “Oteiza: Myth and Modernism”(July 1), a retrospective with more than 125 works, will run concurrently with “Mapplethorpe.” Basque artist Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) is a Constructivist sculptor of considerable gifts. This welcome retrospective is the first to be mounted in America. Following “Oteiza” will be “Russia!,” an exhibition of more than 250 works of Russian painting, sculpture, and iconography from the last nine centuries (September 16).

The Frick Collection continues to wow us with the beautiful ongoing exhibition “Gardens of Eternal Spring: Two Newly Conserved Mughal Carpets” (through August 14). “From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar” (June 1), is a selection of approximately 70 drawings by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Francois Boucher, Jacques Callot, and Antoine Watteau.

The Whitney Museum is mounting three exhibitions, including “Remote Viewing (Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing),” a sup posed “major overview of recent abstract [art]” (June 2) and a retrospective of work by Robert Smithson (1938-73), most famous for his “Spiral Jetty” (1970) in the Great Salt Lake (June 23).

Other exhibitions worth noting include the Brooklyn Museum’s “Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflection on the Thames, 1859-1914” (May 27), which will exhibit Monet’s London paintings alongside works by other artists, including Andre Derain, Camille Pissarro, James McNeil Whistler, and Winslow Homer. “Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire” (September 16), also at the Brooklyn Museum, will be an exhibition of 21 Roman-period mosaics.

This week, the National Academy of Design is mounting “Disegno: The 180th Annual Exhibition” (May 25-July 3), a show that for the first time focuses on studies by Academicians, rather than finished works. Later in the summer, it will follow with its long-awaited retrospective “Jean Helion” (July 14). The French painter Jean Helion (1904-1987) was one of the greatest and most underrated painters of the 20th century. This traveling show of approximately 35 paintings, which begins at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, will be the first museum exhibition of works by the artist in America in 40 years.

Finally, the Jewish Museum is mounting “Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2004” (August 12). Ms. Snyder (b. 1940) is one of the strongest living abstract painters, and this small retrospective of approximately 30 works should be much larger at MoMA or the Guggenheim. Nonetheless, it will guarantee we will see some spectacular abstract paintings this summer. Like the Met’s Matisse show and MoMA’s “Cezanne and Pissarro,” they will make braving Gotham’s tourist-infested, bus-fumed August streets seem worthwhile.