The Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, who is considered by many to be one of Latin America’s foremost Modernists, is not well-known outside that region. The Museum of Modern Art’s show of more than 100 paintings, drawings, life-size dolls, wire skeletons, and handmade objects is the first North American museum retrospective of the artist’s work. Although the show does not make a convincing case for Reverón’s pre-eminence, it will certainly put this wonderfully weird artist on Modernism’s map.

The lines in some of Reverón’s paintings and drawings — hairy, meandering, biting — resemble the zigzagging thread used to suture together his life-size patchwork dolls, which he began making with his companion, Juanita Ríos, around 1940 and used as models. These strange, dirty-white cotton creatures (some of which are on view at MoMA) — with their bound and twisted limbs and their pronglike fingers and toes, and their toile skirts, wigs, jewelry, and painted-on features — were treated by the artist and his houseguests as human beings. Yellowed and worn, these “Silence of the Lamb” figurines, freakish yet friendly, resemble mummies, voodoo or love dolls, and the puppets of Hans Bellmer. One of these nude dolls, “Niza” (1940s) — a kind of sad, androgynous, burlesque oddity straight out of an Otto Dix painting — is leaking her stuffing through torn cavities, and can be seen from the entrance of the MoMA show. Soiled and weathered — the same brownish color range as the paintings and drawings in the show — she sets the stage for all the other works on view.

As a young man, Reverón (1889–1954) pursued painting in Caracas, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris. In Spain he became aware of Goya, Velázquez, and Gaudí, and he studied with José Ruiz Blasco, the father and teacher of Picasso. While in Barcelona he may have rubbed shoulders with the great Uruguayan Constructivist artist Joaquín Torres-García, with whom he shared certain affinities at various periods of his own career. In Venezuela he had been an active member of a young group of Modernist artists known as the Círculo de Bella Artes.

In 1921, Reverón settled in the remote Venezuelan coastal town of Macuto, where, in a period of decades, he built a complex of huts — part Gaudí and part Gilligan’s Island — called El Castillete (the Little Castle). There, in his imaginary universe, he developed his particular style of minimalist Post-Impressionism, in painting, and a mixture of primitive, perform ance/outsider/folk art in his talis manic creations, including his dolls, books, birds, masks, shrunken-head-like sculptures, costumes, household objects, and painting utensils.

Reverón showed signs of mental disturbance and regression when at age 12, he almost died of typhoid fever and, after his recovery, with drew and began playing with and possibly making dolls. The contemporary fascination with Reverón — who, though mildly accomplished as a painter, never fully blossomed — has a lot to do with our need to recognize the “outsider,” the recluse, the crazy artist mystic. Reverón was a unique painter and maker of objects and to some degree, and in starts and spurts, a serious draftsman. Although he made some good paintings and drawings throughout his life, especially the late nudes and self-portraits, he may hold the in terest of a contemporary audience not because of his best works but in our cult-of-personality climate because he is something of a Venezuelan Gauguin or an eccentric, Modernist Robinson Crusoe.

Seen in a contemporary Euro/ North American context, Reverón can be understood to be the Latin American grandfather, bridge, or cousin to a number of European and North American artists and art movements. His sepia-toned or white-on-white landscapes seascapes, nudes, and self-por traits can be linked to a range of painters, from masters such as Goya, Turner, Giacometti, and Marquet to overrated artists such as Agnes Martin, Luc Tuymans and Anselm Kiefer. At heart, he is a Romantic or a Post-Impression ist, but he is also a bit of a nut job.

The MoMA show, much like Reverón’s individual paintings, is slow to boil. Tentative and monochromatic, the artist’s color range is generally limited to soft grays, creamy whites, dirty browns and greens, timid oranges and ochers, as well as the scumbled nub of offwhite canvas, which is often the most active color.

The exhibition opens with “Portrait of Casilda,” a symbolist-inspired portrait head of a girl; “The Cave,” a hazy blue painting of two women based on Goya’s majas, which looks as if it is viewed through an aquarium; and a group of landscapes, all from the 1920s. Two works, “Landscape” and “Fiesta in Carabelleda” — sweet and understated and tinted blue — are painted as if through a fog. These two early paintings, seemingly influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, tend to fall away before they can build to form. The notquite-there, minimalist atmosphere of the landscapes is pushed to the limits during the next 20 years.

Most of Reverón’s early landscapes, portraits, and nudes feel as if they were painted on veils. Their hesitant marks and touches of white generally hint at rather than describe form. Reverón wants a lot out of little. He usually fails, as his forms, which seem to be developing like mirages out of a fog, peter out before they can come into being. There are exceptions. Some of the works — “The Tree” (1931), which conveys sparkling light on water, and “The Port of La Guaira” (1941), in particular — achieve either partially or wholly an atmosphere that moves beyond naturalistic effects to that of a dreamy, twinkling delicacy.

Reverón’s early nudes, as if they were conventional sepia underdrawings, hover like ghosts. Most are crudely drawn, especially in their heads; and few of them pull together into volume. “Nudes” (1938) rises above its constraints, as the elongated figures tend to drift in another realm, and their flushed, reddish flesh rises from out of the raw canvas ground.

The best works come late, in the nudes and self-portraits. As always, Reverón’s work is hit or miss, but some of these pictures from the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as “Nude” (1948), “The Three Models” (1947), and the paintings of a woman or the artist with dolls, full of light and life, are warm, rich, and trembling.

Photographs of the artist show him handsome and rugged, wearing a top hat, or barefoot, bearded, and shirtless, looking like a castaway. Either way, the artist is resolute, confident, and holding his ground. In some of these late drawings and paintings, Reverón captures his visage beautifully. Standing proudly, his dolls attending to him like Justinian’s retinue, the artist is both creator and ruler of his kingdom.

February 11 through April 16 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).