The Tate Modern in London in conjunction with the Nationalgalerie, Staatlich Museen zu Berlin produced the current exhibit of Gerhard Richter at the Centre Pompidou celebrating the artist’s 80th birthday. This exhibit is, in a word, exceptional.

Les histoires de Babar is an exhibition celebrating 80 years since ‘Babar the Elephant’ was first published by Jean de Brunhoff. The exhibition runs until September 2, 2012 at Les Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

Over 3000 years in the making, Paris welcomes the exhibit “Tutankhamen: His Tomb and His Treasures” in its prestigious Porte de Versailles exposition center. Until the middle of September, visitors will be able to recreate the magic the original explorers felt when penetrating Tutankhamen’s mysteries for the first time.

Leave it to the French to mount a pitch-perfect paean to that most quintessential of American symbols: the open road. The Musée des lettres et manuscrits (Museum of Letters and Manuscripts), in collaboration with the French film company, MK2 Productions, has done just that in its exhibition, “Sur la Route de Jack Kerouac: L’épopée, de l’écrit à l’écran” (“On the Road: The Epic, from Writing to the Screen”), at the museum until August 19.

A few blocks away from the metal barriers that rope in the crowds of tourists that conjugate outside Musée D'Orsay, sits the Netherlands Institute on a quiet spot on the Rue de Lille. The site, dedicated to the works of Dutch writers, artists, and photographers, is a wonderful way to spend an hour or two taking in Parisian culture from the eyes of those who moved here to find out just what that phrase really means. The artists achieved this by arriving at Gare du Nord, which until July 29, serves as a photo exhibition at the Institute by the same name.

It’s one of those quirks of fate that two Jewish, maiden ladies from Baltimore via Jonesborough, Tennessee, should travel to France and begin collecting paintings by some of the most famous artists of their age, such as Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, Delacroix, Gauguin, Courbet, Pissarro and Matisse. Dr. Claribel and her sister Etta came from a German family that changed their family name from Kahn.

Visit the Musée Maillol before 15 July and you’ll discover one of the most inspiring stories in the history of art. A female painter, commissioned, championed, celebrated and successful…in early 17 century Italy. Gorgeously lit, Gentileschi’s canvases are dramatic, powerful masterpieces in which we can see the artist’s wit, strength and pride. This exhibition is a wonderful exploration into a seemingly impossible success story, and the triumph of one woman over the social and professional constraints of her time.

The visual history of Paris is inseparable from the name Eugène Atget, which is a very handy thing to know if you’re in Paris between now and 29 July. Should you wish to see an exhibition that IS Paris, rather than simply in Paris, I highly recommend you set a course for the Musée Carnavalet in the heart of the Marais. The photographs (many of them exhibited for the first time) invite us into Atget’s Paris, where he meticulously documented the streets, shops, windows, pedlars, parks and prostitutes of the city in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris is holding the first major retrospective of painter Berthe Morisot’s work in half a century. Originally scheduled to run from March 8 through July 1, the exhibition has been extended through July 29.