Paradox incarnate, Paul Klee is an eccentric who stands at the very center of modern art. Ten different filaments of the modern movement meet and transform themselves within his inscrutable person, and out of him they flow again only to influence the generations that follow.

“Focus: Paul Klee,” a bulldog retrospective of the painter’s career, is assembled from among the Klees in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. It is the first in a series of such shows that will eventually turn its attention to Calder and David Smith, among others. The present exhibition efficiently gives us Klee’s entire career in 32 very eminent paintings, drawings, and prints. Within its narrow terms, however, it affords us a vivid sense of the Swiss artist’s variety, his ability to swerve backward, forward, and sideways among his many stylistic options, in a variety of mediums and on surfaces as oddball as burlap and warped tracingpaper.

Consider Klee’s richly stippled etchings from around 1903. In form they are entirely unlike what he would go on to do, but in spirit they seem entirely of a piece with everything we know of his character. These earliest works, like his very latest, show Klee to have been the world’s sweetest satirist. In one of them, depicting a pair of men who bow and scrape to one another, the title tells all: “Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other of Higher Rank.” The Prussian hairstyles mark them as men of consequence. And yet they stand there naked, though unaware of their nakedness. Klee is taking aim at the false and dehumanizing ways of the world, but his figures seem more to be pitied than despised.

Here, as in every other work by Klee, the grand strategy and overriding mission is to fracture the social carapace we don and then become, so that the human being, smaller but more fully alive, can dare to show himself again. Formally, these works look back to such French etchers of the 19th century as Redon and Bresdin, while their fabulistic tone, recalling children’s books, suggests any number of accomplished illustrators in the Central Europe of the day.

But when we next hear from him in the context of this show, 12 years have passed and Klee (1879–1940) is in his mid-30s and a committed modernist. A work like “Introducing the Miracle,” from 1916, is clearly enfeoffed to Synthetic Cubism, but with none of the bombastic epistemological claims and high purpose that characterize so many works in this style. Rather, Klee invokes its geometric idiom to form a fragile tissue of drawn lines and modulated, cloud-like hues. As in so much of his work, one finds here an almost defiant humility that, once again, wears its human frailty as a badge of honor.

Klee’s commitment to this artistic attitude is so strong that it survives even his joining the Bauhaus faculty in the 1920s. His co-optation by the group was hardly a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it is hard to imagine two souls less compatible than those of Walter Gropius, the sullen, humorless engineer, and Paul Klee, the poet and otherworldly mooncalf. A work like “Fire in the Evening” (1929) represents the ways in which Klee reached an accommodation between the magisterial dictates of the Bauhaus and the leanings of his own temperament. An abstract patchwork of variations on yellows and reds mostly, this diminutive specimen evokes the color theories of Josef Albers and Johannes Itten, his colleagues at the Bauhaus. But his moody and unstable lines are quite unlike anything else to come out of that institution, and their frailty gives the lie to its vaunting ambitions.

With its implicit defense of the frail, the rejected, the anarchic in human society, “Fire in the Evening” can stand as an emblem of Klee’s entire career, and it displays the element of his work that was to be most important for all who followed. This element is so important that it has fundamentally transformed everything from high art and advertising to postage stamps and New Yorker cartoons.

When Henry James declared, “We writers must appear before the public in full dress,” he was expressing that sense of polish, professionalism, and almost bullying overachievement that had characterized our culture from its inception. Surely Courbet and Duchamp differed from James in how they chose to appear before the public, but the very attitude of wanting to look good, to look impressive, was implicitly shared by all of them.

It was the palmary achievement of Klee, however, to explode that formality, to win a hearing for all that was timid and louche and even infantile. Likewise he was the first to discover that these forms of address, judiciously deployed, could leverage an efficiency of subversion as powerful as anything in the arsenals of his hard-blowing contemporaries

Out of this artistic position would come Art Brut and Saul Steinberg, and any number of movements, from Pop to the East Village scene, that it influenced to one degree or another and at various removes. In time, Klee’s unpolished and unfinished vocabulary of forms would lodge itself in the collective eye of mankind as nothing less than a new way of seeing and even feeling. Everything from the typography of our advertising, with its wobbly and antiheroic scripts, to the former currency of the Netherlands, owes a debt to this aspect of the art of Paul Klee.

The case could surely be made that, after some three generations, humanizing subversion is hardly as pressing a cause as it once was. These days, indeed, our culture as a whole could probably do with a bit more of Henry James’s full-dress formality. But that fact does little to undermine Klee’s achievement, both spiritual and artistic, or the pleasure we continue to take in it.

Until March 5 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).