The Shows Go On From Warhol to the Mick, a survey of the biggest and best museum exhibitions of the summer.
By Carolyn Edy

(FORTUNE Small Business) – Last year the second most popular museum exhibit in the world wasn't an Old Master but a young subject: "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years," featuring dresses from the former First Lady's wardrobe. In the past decade, museums have gotten a lot savvier about marketing themselves and less formal about their subjects. The Guggenheim Las Vegas is currently showing "The Art of the Motorcycle," for example. Chicago's Field Museum has "Chocolate," and at the Bronx Museum of the Arts recently you could see "Manicurated" and even get your nails done--the exhibit included a working salon.

If this makes traditionalists cringe, they should realize that museums don't have much choice. As government funding for the arts has shrunk (down almost 30% from 1989 to 1999), the facilities are increasingly dependent on private donations and on getting people in the door. If anything, though, the effort to make shows more audience-friendly has paid off. Attendance has nearly doubled in the past decade.

That said, many of the biggest, most popular shows this summer feature art and antiquities that are extremely valuable and movingly beautiful. Here, a quick glance at those most likely to grab headlines.

ANDY WARHOL RETROSPECTIVE When Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans series was first shown at a Los Angeles gallery in 1962, the paintings bewildered, angered, and amused both artists and collectors. A neighboring dealer stacked cans of Campbell's soup in his window with a sign reading THE REAL THING FOR 29 CENTS. By the time the show closed, only five of the 32 paintings had been sold, but the gallery owner thought they should stay as one. He persuaded buyers to relinquish their claims so that he could purchase the set.

If the significance of a single soup can changes when viewed among 31 others, imagine what happens when more than 200 Warhol works share space for the first time. About half of the pieces in this exhibition are on loan from private collections, and the rest hail from ten museums in the U.S. and abroad, all chosen by Heiner Bastian, an art historian with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

This retrospective is only the second in the U.S. and is the largest since 1989, two years after Warhol's death. It is credited by The Independent with saving England's Tate galleries (home of the country's national collection of British art and international modern art) from a year in the red. The show spans Warhol's entire career, from the drawings of his adolescence to the Marilyn and Mao works to his last major series, based on da Vinci's 15th-century Last Supper. And of course you'll see Campbell's Soup Cans.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; moca-la.org; through Aug. 18.

ETERNAL EGYPT It isn't easy to bring Egypt to Kansas City. The 144 items in this collection take up 12,000 square feet of space (6,000 feet more than the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has for temporary shows). A 4,800-pound lion carved from red granite exceeded the lift capacity of the museum's freight elevator. But the museum sent some of its permanent collection into storage, used its hallways, gave up its public space in favor of a tent for lectures, and hired a crane. In the end everything fit, and the lion had a smooth ride up.

"Eternal Egypt" is the first comprehensive look at the art history of a civilization that was so completely immersed in artistic activity that it had no general word for art. The range of materials--including terra cotta, papyrus, ivory, glass, and wood--take the shape of jewelry, statues, coffin lids, paintings, and more.

The British Museum, which organized the exhibit jointly with the American Federation of Arts, has the largest collection of its kind outside Cairo. More than half of the works presented have never been outside England. Edna R. Russmann, curator of Egyptian, classical, and ancient Middle Eastern art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, who selected the pieces, arranged them chronologically--"the best way to keep track of more than 30 centuries of Egyptian art," Russman writes in the 288-page catalog.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; nelson-atkins.org; through July 7.

BASEBALL AS AMERICA Can one woman lead a team of six curators through 35,000 objects, 600,000 photographs, 5,000 hours of video and audio, two million documents ... and still keep her sanity? Yes, but it was close. Kristen Mueller, assistant curator for Cooperstown's National Baseball Hall of Fame, spent two years assembling the 500 items for this traveling exhibition from the Hall of Fame's ever-growing collection. (At one point, she says, Mickey Mantle even visited her in a dream.)

All that work should pay off. The show is expected to draw four million visitors on its three-year U.S. tour. That's a third of the total visits to the Hall of Fame in its 63-year history.

"It's much more than just bats, balls, and gloves," Mueller says (though diehards will find plenty of all three). Highlights: the Doubleday Ball from baseball's near-mythical first game in 1839, Jackie Robinson's 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's shoes, and the most valuable baseball card in the world, a T-206 Honus Wagner from 1909. And if you get hungry, the "Hot Dogs as America" display offers dogs from ten ballparks around the country.

American Museum of Natural History, New York; amnh.org; through Aug. 18.