Some of the summer blockbusters have already arrived, and a few of them have been staged not by curators in museums but by private dealers in galleries. Certainly, the biggest hit of the season is the sublime new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, redesigned by architect Kevin Roche and with reinstallation overseen by the Met’s chief curator of classical art, Carlos Picón. A “museum-within-a-museum,” the more than 57,000 square feet devoted to more than 7,500 artworks is a breathtaking marriage of architecture and art.

But Greco-Roman antiquities are not the only reason to head to 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Also at the Met are the shows “Poiret: King of Fashion,” which closes August 5, and “Venice and the Islamic World: 828–1797,” a dazzling array of Venetian and Islamic art, which is up through July 8. Poiret revolutionized women’s fashion in the early 20th century, by doing away with, among other Old World bindings, the corset. He also commissioned artists such as Raoul Dufy to design fabrics in which the line between high and low is completely obliterated. Also at the Met (closing August 19) is “Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings: The Clark Brothers Collect,” an exhibit of more than 65 works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Seurat, among others, owned by the rival siblings. In terms of great exhibits, New York galleries are keeping pace with the city’s museums. Four current gallery shows are must-sees: “Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns, and Whores” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (closes June 9); “Claude Monet (1840–1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff” at Wildenstein & Co., Inc., the largest Monet show in America in more than 30 years (closes June 15); Salander-O’Reilly’s “Constable Oil Sketches: The Maria Bicknell Years (1809–29)” (closes June 16), and PaceWildenstein’s “Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism” (closes June 23). While at PaceWildenstein, also check out “Form and Color: Aquatints by Georges Rouault and 16th Century German Stained Glass,” which goes through June 9. Although the stained glass is a little late and a little Northern (French Gothic would have suited Rouault better), the comparison between Rouault’s rubbery line and his local, translucent color with the leading and colored glass provides an object lesson in artistic influence and innovation.

Other spring exhibits worth seeing include the Morgan Library & Museum’s “Apocalypse Then: Medieval Illuminations From the Morgan,” an astounding grouping of Spanish, French, Flemish, English, and Russian “Apocalypses” from between the 10th and the 18th centuries (closes June 17), and Neue Galerie’s “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” which closes July 2.

Opening tomorrow at the Noguchi Museum is an exhibit of 30 gouache drawings and six sculptures Noguchi created in Paris in 1928, just after the artist had finished his apprenticeship with Brancusi. And beginning June 19, at Asia Society, is “Condensation: Five Video Works by Chen Chieh-Jen,” the first major solo show in America of the Taiwanese artist. The Whitney Museum of American Art is mounting “Rudolf Stingel,” a mid-career retrospective of the conceptual painter (opens June 28), and “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” an exhibit that, according to the press release, “revisits the unprecedented explosion of contemporary art and popular culture brought about by the civil unrest and pervasive social change of the 1960s and early ’70s, when a new psychedelic aesthetic emerged,” opens tomorrow.

This summer, the Morgan Library & Museum is mounting the show “Federico da Montefeltro and His Library” (opens June 8). The Renaissance patron and Duke of Urbino, da Montefeltro (1422–82) helped transform Urbino from a small state to one of the most thriving cultural centers in Italy. The exhibition, through paintings, books, and digital reproductions, will re-create da Montefeltro’s studiolo in Renzo Piano’s “cube.”

The Museum of Modern Art is finally putting its new, super-size galleries to use with the retrospective “Richard Serra: Forty Years,” a show, opening June 3, that will span the entire career of Mr. Serra (born 1939), and will include early neon and rubber sculptures, as well as the recent, monumental “Torqued Ellipses.”

New York gallery shows of particular merit include Cheim & Read’s “Joan Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956–92,” a comprehensive survey of works on paper by the great second-generation Abstract Expressionist (closes June 16), and “It’s All Spiritual,” a show of tribal arts from remote cultures throughout the world, curated by the tribal art specialist Alan Steele for the Betty Cuningham Gallery. The exhibit will comprise ancient to early 20th-century Native American, Meso American, Polynesian, Indonesian, Melanesian, African, and Chinese objects. The Philadelphia artist Zoe Strauss, who made a splash at the 2006 Whitney Biennial with her slide show of urban photographs, including images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is getting her first one-person show in New York at Bruce Silverstein Photography (closes June 23); and “Memory Comes From Dark Extension,” an exhibition of new work by the sculptor Richard Tuttle, continues through June 30 at Sperone Westwater.

If you have already taken in the Met’s New Greek and Roman Galleries, as well as Monet, Mitchell, Serra, Tuttle, and Rouault, and you are looking for daytrips beyond the five boroughs, keep in mind that the Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, N.Y., is presenting an exhibit of approximately 20 sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, most of which are installed indoors (closes November 15); and the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Conn., is offering the show “Faith and Fortune: Five Centuries of European Masterworks,” a gathering of 60 of the museum’s renowned paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts (closes December 9).