DÜSSELDORF.- On a recent morning in a tidy workshop a half-hour from his home here, Thomas Schütte, one of Europe’s most celebrated artists, was face to face with a devil. It was deep blue, stout as a gnome, with phallic horns, grasping arms and gaping eyeholes. Soon to be cast in bronze, the sculpture was up on a forklift so its maker could look it in the eyes.

Was Schütte confronting his own image?

The monster’s arms were his, scanned in 3D, and maybe its impish aura was his, too. As Schütte gave me a tour last month through workplaces in and around Düsseldorf — a bronze foundry, a ceramics workshop, an exhibition space — he talked with a devilish twinkle about having once faxed the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, which kept putting off the Schütte retrospective that now fills its sixth floor, to say that they would “talk about the show when I’m dead.”

He chuckled at the blowback he expects to greet some sculptures there of nude women, hacked up Picasso-style. And he derided most “advanced” conceptual art as “a dead end” — although his own versions are getting big play in the exhibition, which opens Sunday and runs through Jan. 18.

Schütte clearly takes pleasure in seeming fiendish.

But it’s mostly for show. The 69-year-old checking out that devil was also in blue, but it was the blue of a European Union bureaucrat: blue jacket, pale blue dress shirt. He has neat, side-parted hair and unassuming glasses with plastic frames. In the European art world, if not yet in the United States, he is as establishment as could be: He has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and has had solo shows at major museums across the continent. And as he talks about art and life and a complex career, he reveals a measured, thoughtful side that fights his inclination toward the fearsome.

Schütte is as hard to pin down as any skilled politician, but the contradictions he swims in don’t feel like affectation or manipulation. He seems to have an innate urge to misdirect that also comes through in art that is so varied, complicated and even inscrutable that it’s equally hard to pin down.

“What’s so great about the work is that there’s a lot I still don’t understand about it,” said Paulina Pobocha, the curator of Schütte’s MoMA survey. That includes struggling to comprehend how such a range of art can come from one artist.

The MoMA retrospective includes the bone-dry conceptualism that impressed Schütte’s classmates in art school in the 1970s: a five-day scribble that turned his drawing paper black; walls covered in 1,200 faux bricks, each of which also counted as a little abstraction.

And there is work that seems to head in the opposite direction: the ardent, expressionist sculptures he started making in the 1980s, featuring misshapen heads and melting, Michelin Man bodies — and those hacked-up reclining nudes. There will also be his riffs on architecture, deploying a modernism that is hard to spot elsewhere in his work.

Schütte’s baffling range may trace back to his first notable encounter with art, as a 17-year-old, when he traveled on a class trip from Osnabrück, in northwestern Germany, to the 1972 edition of the great Documenta art exhibition. The show pulled in all the recent trends: minimalism, photorealism, Art Brut and the latest conceptual and performative works. Schütte said he went home with a clear message: “Everything is possible.”

A portfolio of surrealist drawings, like those that high-schoolers still turn out, was somehow enough to get him admitted to the venerable Art Academy in Düsseldorf, the orderly city where he has lived pretty much ever since. At the academy, in the mid-1970s, the latest cerebral art was coming to dominate. The school was famous for classes by Gerhard Richter, best known for painted riffs on banal photos, and by Bernd and Hilla Becher, pioneers of conceptual photography who gathered photos of steel mills and water towers into vast grids.

Schütte ended up a Richter student but learned as much from visits by the latest American innovators: Richard Serra, the heavy-metal sculptor, and card-carrying conceptualists such as Dan Graham and Lawrence Weiner. Their work was championed, Schütte said, in a class taught by Benjamin Buchloh, who went on to become one of the world’s most prominent art critics and theorists.

Schütte took this “completely difficult” art to heart.

He titled his all-black scribble “Amerika” after the brand of cheap pencils he used, but also in a clear nod to the space the New World was taking up in the German psyche. That work is at MoMA, as one of several pieces Pobocha bills as speaking to the complexities of postwar Germany. According to Schütte, his father, a lieutenant in Hitler’s army, did five years of forced labor in the Soviet Union after Germany’s defeat. He stayed silent about that era in his life, Schütte said.

Schütte “cannot liberate himself, of course, from the world and the country and the history he grew up with — we all can’t,” said Klaus Biesenbach, a German-born curator who was at MoMA for many years and now runs Germany’s national museum of modern art. But Schütte also transcends that local context to count as “monumentally important and monumentally influential,” Biesenbach said.

Dieter Schwarz, a Swiss curator, said that Schütte’s mature career was, in part, an effort to escape the overwhelming presence of the Art Academy’s conceptualists: “For a young artist,” he said, “it must have been really quite a burden.” The way out was to turn away from the brainy rigors of the American model, Schwarz added, and toward expressiveness and the human figure.

Within a year of graduating, Schütte came up with one of his signature images: “Man in Mud,” which began as a tiny figurine up to its knees in melted wax and then got presented in endless riffs, including a giant bronze and several other versions now at MoMA. Sculptures in the same expressionist vein include Schütte’s vast series of “United Enemies,” featuring two grim-looking old men bound together by ropes and rags.

Those works stand as a repudiation of the modernist tradition Schütte had been schooled in. They also represent the orneriness that is classic Schütte.

“Thomas is an archcontrarian,” said curator Lynne Cooke, who gave Schütte a trio of shows at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1998 and 1999 and then followed up with a Madrid retrospective in 2010. “If you say left, he’ll say right,” she said.

Schütte’s New York dealer, Peter Freeman, says that this rebel attitude extends to sales. “He does not want to do anything the market asks for,” Freeman said, and pointed out that Schütte has chosen not to have a show in his gallery this fall, even though — or maybe because — the MoMA survey would almost guarantee sales.

“Basically, I want to be different, or on my own, or opposite,” Schütte once said. “I’m in opposition to anything you can mention.”

The problem Schütte ought to recognize is that, in the case of modernism, at least, his opposition can seem simply reactionary, turning toward tradition just to turn back the clock.

Buchloh, Schütte’s teacher, had judged him “brilliant” as a student artist but described Schütte’s mature works to me as “an enigma, if not a visual nuisance.” Schütte’s understandable resistance to the looming presence of American modernism had made him lapse back into “some type of mythical German expressionist culture,” Buchloh added.

It doesn’t help Schütte’s cause that he refuses to propose some more exciting interpretation of what he’s up to.

At the bronze foundry, Schütte showed me a giant green sculpture of a crouching animal with sawed-off horns, an insect’s antennas and rope-bound paws. “I still don’t know what it is,” Schütte said, despite having worked on it for a year. “I never propose a reading,” he added. “The more readings a piece has after 500 years — and we only live 50 years — the better is its chance of surviving. The one-liner never survives.”

But neither does the no-liner, or the work that invites so many readings that there’s no choosing between them.

Schütte’s no-stance stance may even leave him open to readings that put some of his works at risk. Buchloh said, for instance, that Schütte’s mangled sculptures of naked women struck him as “reprehensible, in terms of their sexism.”

Schütte acknowledged that his nudes can be “cruel”: Some have bodies that look melted, and featureless faces like pie plates; others might have been dismembered by the bombs in “Guernica.” Pobocha, showcasing several at MoMA, said there was a tradition in European art that Schütte was bashing away at in the series. “He’s not cutting up female bodies,” she added. “It’s sculpture.”

Schütte’s own take on the issue comes via a similar problem faced by Picasso. He cited a notion, which he attributed to the art critic John Berger, that Picasso’s fractured women in fact reveal the painter “mirroring himself.” Was Schütte suggesting that these figures also offer up a self-portrait?

After all, he speaks of having a deeply fractured psyche: He told me about spells of mental illness that led to several hospital stays. Schwarz, the curator, said, “A man in the mud, I mean, it’s like the basic metaphor of Thomas’ life.”

Maybe that sculpture is not just an image of one man mired in his existence, or even of a burdened everyman, but of an artist who has arrived so late to the game that there’s no freedom of movement left. Schütte’s whole career could be seen as staging the failure of all the modes of art he inherited, from conceptualism to expressionism to realism to abstraction.

Buchloh may be wrong to read Schütte as looking backward. Schütte could be painting a picture focused squarely, bravely, bleakly on the present — a picture of an art world that doesn’t know where to turn, where artists are stuck up to the knees and beyond.

The variety in Schütte’s work seems to capture a current moment when none of the options can garner the kind of deep allegiance that earlier artists could pledge. As Schütte once said, “I think more ironically than the older generation do — they really could believe in themselves.”

Even his nods to tradition can be read as more ironic than worshipful. He admitted that his crafty materials — his watercolors, glazed ceramics and colorful Venetian glass, maybe even his bronzes — risk sliding into kitsch. He deadpanned that collectors seem to have a special fondness for filling their bedrooms with “my kitschy stuff.”

Pobocha said she reads the work she is celebrating at MoMA as “trying to ask the audience to question the assumptions they bring to an object or image.” But what if it’s asking us to question the entire enterprise of Western fine art and its possible future?

“I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel,” Schütte once told a critic. “Well, I see some light, but it could be a train coming.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.