Summer is the height of the art year for museums, and this season’s enticing selection of exhibitions could very well influence vacation planning. Innovative shows can be seen in such summer tourist destinations as Salem and Williamstown in Massachusetts, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Humlebaek, Denmark. Napoleonic design, fashion and jazzy African-American quilts vie for attention with new takes on such old standbys as Claude Monet, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson and Edward Hopper.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum
“Nan Kempner, American Chic” (through Nov. 11)

Unquestionably, this is one of the most visually dazzling shows of the year, as attested to by the enormous crowds that flocked to it this past winter when it was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition makes a powerful case for fashion as art. Kempner, labeled “the world’s most famous clotheshorse” by Vanity Fair and “la plus chic du monde,” by Yves Saint Laurent, in the 1950s started assembling a collection that included haute couture, sportswear and accessories by such names as Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Lanvin and Manuel Ungaro.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction” (through Sept. 9)

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most popular and studied American artists of the 20th century, and yet it is a testament to her greatness and rich creativity that scholars are constantly uncovering new issues and themes embedded in her imagery. The most recent discovery comes from Mint Museum curator Jonathan Stuhlman, former curator of American art at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, where this exhibition originated. The show of approximately 60 works traces the artist’s prolific use of circular motifs, including ovals, ellipses and arching lines, and analyzes O’Keeffe’s compositional and iconographic dependence on this form. Adding to the allure of the exhibition is the fact that it can be seen in Santa Fe, near where O’Keeffe lived for the last 60 years of her life and where she made many of the works in the show.

High Museum of Art, Atlanta
“Louvre Atlanta: Kings as Collectors” and “Decorative Arts of the Kings” (now through Sept. 2)
“The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece” (through July 15)
“Annie Liebovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005” (through Sept. 9)
“Cecila Beaux: American Figure Painter” (through Sept. 9)

The High Museum of Art may be serving up the largest and classiest exhibition smorgasbord in America, one that will keep you busy for days. First, there are the two Louvre Atlanta exhibitions—“Kings as Collectors” and “Decorative Arts of the Kings”—which, through a three-year loan arrangement with the Louvre, presents late 17th- and 18th-century masterpieces of fine and decorative arts from the royal collections of France’s most famous museum. If time allows, catch Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “The Gates of Paradise,” the recently restored bronze doors made in 1452 for the baptistery of the Duomo in Florence. This landmark of Renaissance sculpture will be on view at the High through July 15. You may need a break before tackling the enormous traveling Annie Liebovitz show, which not only presents many of the artist’s most famous commercial portrait commissions, with subjects including Demi Moore, Al Pacino and Mick Jagger, but also displays many personal works, especially photographs of her lover, Susan Sontag, dying. And last, but not least, is a magnificent exhibition of the turn-of-the-century Philadelphia portraitist, Cecilia Beaux, who during her lifetime was compared to John Singer Sargent, in part due to her luscious handling of paint and color.

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
“Lucian Freud” (through Sept. 2)

The 85-year-old Lucian Freud looms as one of the great figurative painters of the last 60 years and certainly rivals the likes of Willem de Kooning when it comes to manipulating oil paint. It only seems appropriate that Frued’s imagery, mostly portraits and nudes, is filled with psychological tension, since the London artist is the grandson of the famous father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The show presents some 70 works, including several new paintings, among which are views of his garden, that reveal a side to the artist’s oeuvre that few viewers know about. The show travels to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, Sept. 15–Jan. 28, 2008, and the Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Feb. 18–June 8, 2008.

The Jewish Museum, New York
“The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend” (through Sept. 16)

Many of the 66 works in this Louise Nevelson retrospective, the first in 20 years, may look familiar, but the story behind them will not be. In a radical departure from traditional interpretation, guest curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport sees the artist’s sculpture, drawings and paintings as imbued with autobiography, culminating in such iconic works as “Dawn’s Wedding Feast” and “Mrs. N’s Palace.” These two room-size installations are executed in Nevelson’s signature style—boxes filled with an assemblage of wood detritus scavenged from the streets of New York, all painted a haunting black. The latter installation is even shaped like a house, obviously Nevelon’s “palace.” The show includes rarely exhibited drawings that will be a pleasant surprise to viewers not familiar with the artist’s outstanding draftsmanship.