Idyllically situated along the Mediterranean, within sight of the Pyrenees, Barcelona is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. This natural beauty serves as a striking background to an impressive collection of art and architecture. But Barcelona’s artistic significance was not always well known. In the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibit focusing on the city, the critic Robert Hughes writes that in the 1960s, “most non-Catalans and non-Spaniards failed to appreciate what a seedbed of invention and talent the city had been. Nor grasp, at first, how its modernity was interwoven with its past.”

The Met’s exhibit “Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí,” which opens next Wednesday, is sure to bring wider recognition to that “seedbed of invention.” The exhibit is the first in North America to examine the astonishingly fertile 51-year period between 1888, the year of the Barcelona Universal Exposition, and the imposition of the devastating fascist regime of Francisco Franco in 1939. The breadth of work on display demonstrates the 1,500-year-old city’s enormous contribution to contemporary art and architecture made by the city’s artists.

Fortunately for today’s visitors, remnants of the period are everywhere in the capital of Catalonia.

Architecture and art are part of daily life in Barcelona. Architects including Richard Meier, Santiago Calatrava, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, and César Pelli have built there. Surrealist mansions designed by the influential Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudí border the main thoroughfare, Passeig de Gràcia. A tapas bar at the Olympic Port overlooks Mr. Gehry’s large whalelike sculpture “Peix Daurat.” Shoppers in the cast-iron building housing Boqueria market, with its mosaic pavement by Joan Miró, can see Roy Lichtenstein’s 64-inch-high “Barcelona Head,” covered in ceramic tiles. Fernando Botero’s plump bronze cat, “El Gat,” can be seen on the Rambla del Raval. And there is the Picasso Museum, the Miró Foundation, the National Museum of Catalan Art, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Met’s exhibit will feature about 300 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, posters, jewelry, ceramics, decorative objects, furniture, and architectural models and designs. Highlights include Picasso’s “La Vie” and “Blindman’s Meal” from his Blue Period, Miró’s “The Farm,” Dalí’s surrealist paintings, as well as furniture designed by Gaudí. The exhibit was organized with the Cleveland Museum of Art, in association with Barcelona’s National Museum of Catalan Art.

Gaudí, Miró, Picasso, and Dalí are used as a portal through which to introduce a host of lesser known but significant artists, architects, and designers. They include painters Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol, architect Lluís Doménech I Montaner, and urban planner Ildefons Cerdá.

What exactly does Catalan mean in relation to art and architecture? “It’s being part of a spirit that has the capacity to be spontaneous and rational at the same time,” an associate professor of painting at Kingsborough Community College at CUNY, the Catalan artist Manel Lledós, said. “Because of our geographic setting, with its mythical, political, and sensual force, we’re unusually aware of its presence, and the sea and the mountains of our landscape have always played an important role in the conception of our work. We respect the past but not as something sacred and inaccessible. It’s to be played with.”

Discussing the painters Miró, Tàpies, and Miquel Barceló, Mr. Lledós said, “Our artists often create an interaction between language and visual images using the words to subvert the context in order to reach a higher metaphor. The result is a kind of visual poetry. Gaudí did something similar in his buildings, combining elements like broken bottles, tiles, metal, and brick — all of them extremely tactile and with a direct reference to our everyday life.”

Gaudí’s whimsical sculptural façade of the Casa Milà was inspired by the profile of Montserrat mountain near Barcelona. Mr. Nouvel was inspired by the same mountain to build his charismatic Agbar Tower, covered externally with multicolored windows that relate to the trencadís — the broken colored tiles used by Gaudí and other modernist architects. The Hotel Plaza, designed by Enric Sòria and Jordi Garcés, features an interior courtyard covered with tiles inspired in Gaudí’s Casa Batlló on the Passeig de Gràcia.

The Met’s exhibition organizers, consultant Magdalena Dabrowski and associate curator Jared Goss, both from the department of 19thcentury modern and contemporary art, traveled to Barcelona and other areas of Catalonia to consult with staff from the local museums and see the art and architecture firsthand. “I felt Barcelona today must be very much like the vital city of the modernist period,” Ms. Dabrowski said, “with a tremendous drive to be international, to be part of Europe and the greater world, outside Spain.”

“It makes a big difference in understanding a place,” Mr. Goss said, “when you taste the food, drink the wine, and feel the energy in the streets, even seeing the rust and brown of the countryside, which is so common in Catalan landscape paintings. I particularly loved a trip we took to the seaside town of Sitges to see a small museum. But it wasn’t so much the memory of the art that stays with me, but the luminous light. That’s the light of Catalan painting.”

Ms. Dabrowksi said the aesthetic — and literal — high point for her was seeing the city from atop Barcelona’s great symbol, Gaudí’s unfinished temple, the Sagrada Familia, with its polychrome ceramic mosaics and anthromorphic forms. “I know it’s corny,” she said, “but it was absolutely amazing to see the entire city and the sea and the mountains from there. Everything came together for me, Barcelona’s beauty, history, and art.” When her exhibit opens next week, New Yorkers, too, will be able to experience a piece of that vista.