Periodically the Museum of Modern Art orchestrates what I call a Miró Immersion, one of those experiences that can make you an art lover for life or, if that’s already the case, prompt you to renew your vows . It’s an exhibition, of course, and it’s devoted to the Spanish modernist Joan Miró (1893-1983). But thanks to MoMA’s extraordinary holdings in Miró’s work and its curatorial familiarity with them, these shows sometimes achieve a pervasive, extra-visual intensity.

This happens in “Joan Miró: Birth of the World,” especially in an astounding first gallery which is alive with Miró’s inventiveness, natural talent and playful malice. The show brings together 60 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated books made mostly from 1920 to the early 1950s, all but a handful from the museum’s collection. The focus is “The Birth of the World,” a prescient painting that might even qualify as a “lost masterpiece.” Painted by Miró in 1925, it was largely unknown, except to a handful of artists and other art-world denizens until 1968, when it was included in “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” MoMA’s comprehensive survey of the two movements that introduced anti-materialism and Freudian explorations of the unconscious into 20th-century art.