The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent “Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí” is one of those Herculean exhibits that attempt to transport a foreign culture to a museum halfway around the world. An illuminating “Grand Tour,” the show comprises about 300 objects — a number of them masterpieces — including paintings, sculpture, photographs, maps, decorative arts, graphic design, and architectural miscellany. Like the recent shows “China,” “Russia!,” and “Prague,” as well as, to some degree, “Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History,” “Barcelona and Modernity” is both a lavish banquet and a single enticing slice of the pie.

Organized in nine thematic sections, the exhibit begins with the origins of the Catalan Renaissance, which was made possible through Barcelona’s expansion after the destruction of the city’s medieval walls in 1856, and then explores that Renaissance — the years between the Barcelona Universal Exposition of 1888 and the imposition of the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco in 1939. It was a revolutionary period of industrial, political, intellectual, and artistic growth for Barcelona, which was then the most prosperous, avantgarde, and sophisticated city in Spain.

In terms of art, this period in Barcelona has a number of highlights, including the architecture of Antoni Gaudí (the greatest Art Nouveau architect), the German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition (1929) designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (one of the greatest Modernist architects), as well as Picasso’s mural “Guernica” (1939). Commissioned by the republican government and exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, in 1939, “Guernica”‘s subject is the destruction through carpet bombing, on April 26, 1937, of the Basque city by Fascists.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s “Guernica” is the glaring omission in “Barcelona and Modernity.” But Picasso, represented through studies and paintings for and after “Guernica,” as well as earlier works, still manages to steal much of the show.

The exhibit has galleries devoted to Modernisme in painting and sculpture, art and society, and architecture and design. One section focuses on the legendary café El Quatre Gats (Four Cats), another on Noucentisme (New Classicism), avant-garde painting, and the new rational architecture influenced by Le Corbusier, the innovative group Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture. The show ends with a striking gallery of art and design inspired by the Spanish Civil War.

“Barcelona and Modernity” makes sense out of disparate and conflicting ideas — artistic, cultural, and political. The show moves fluidly from Art Nouveau and Symbolism to Fauvism and Cubism to Art Deco and de Stijl, and it brings Barcelona to life through Spanish art. It offers insights that, to my eyes, never have before been available outside of Spain.

In many ways, I felt as if I were seeing some of these works for the first time: Julio González’s “Raised Left Hand, No. 2” (1942) speaks to the inflated, raised right hand in Joan Miró’s primary colored stencil print “Aidez L’Espagne” (Help Spain) (1937), a hallmark of graphic design. Miró’s masterpieces “Self-Portrait” (1920) and “The Farm” (1921–22) feel fresh and earthshaking — as if someone had opened a window in the galleries and then shattered it. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “Barcelona Chair” (1929) and Grupo Austral’s “BFK Chair Prototype” (“butterfly” chair) (1938) convey qualities that, though utterly Modern, will henceforth be etched in my mind as Old World Catalan.

Picasso’s dark early canvases such as “The Artist’s Sister,” “Interior of the Quatre Gats” (both 1899), and “Moulin de la Galette” (1900) have never looked more penetrating and mysterious. His Blue Period “La Vie” and “Blindman’s Meal” (both 1903) have never been more ominous; and his Rose Period paintings such as “Catalan Landscape”; “Woman With Loaves,” an enigma that is part architecture and part Madonna, and “The Harem,” a luxuriant and erotic reverie (all 1906), have never felt more warm and exotic — more “Spanish.” Picasso’s Blue Period is one of his weakest; yet here, haunting and alive, the ghostly Blue Period canvases outshine ever other work nearby. Those paintings stayed with me to the very end of the show, where their dreamy melancholia met up with the shrieks of his masterful “Weeping Women.”

The drawback to “Barcelona and Modernity” is that, because it errs on the side of thoroughness, it showcases some second- and third-tier painters and sculptors, such as Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Eusebi Arnau, Miquel Blay, and Josep Llimona, who were essential to their time but cannot keep pace with posterity. At times their inclusion feels at the expense of other artists, such as the Uruguayan Constructivist Joaquin Torres-García, a modern master who is not at all well-represented in the exhibit. On the plus side, it encourages the act of comparison. In this august company, Salvador Dalí feels tied less to Spain than to kitsch.

It is Gaudí who anchors both Barcelona and the Met’s show, where a breathtaking gallery is devoted to him. Unlike any artist before or after, Gaudí creates hybrids in which ornamentation, functionalism, flora, and fauna all butt heads. Gaudí celebrates everything and wastes nothing. He creates furniture, fixtures, and architecture that are part animal and part object. His “Double Folding Screen From Casa Milà” (1909) alights like a large bird. His celadon “Paving Tiles,” seemingly filled with microbes and fossils, teem with life. His chairs are animated and gnarly. They look as if they would just as soon eat as support you. And his masterful “Palau Güell, Dressing Table” (c. 1889) combines everything into one strange organism. Dignified and extravagant, the table moves as naturally as wild vines and as gracefully as a ballerina. It prances with pomp and circumstance, and it tilts and relaxes in places, as if at rest. Gaudí, equally Old World and New, nightmare and fantasy, is the heart and fire of both Barcelona and Modernity.

Until June 3 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).