We are looking at a man who stands on his own, arms hanging by his side, chest puffed out, face untroubled. He is an ideal, a model; he ought to be a hero. But just above his knees his legs give out, thawing into a formless muck — the result, the German artist Thomas Schütte once explained, of his inability to get a wax figure to stand upright on its own. It was the first time he’d tried to sculpt a standing human, but he couldn’t get the relative weight right. It kept on falling, failing. The only solution was to clump leftover wax onto the legs, so that the man seemed half-submerged in mud.

On Friday night, C.D.C. officials said that there was “no epidemiological evidence at this time to support person-to-person transmission of H5N1,” but that additional research was needed.

Well, we are knee-deep in it too these days, and for the last 50 years this wryly intelligent artist has validated a few good resolutions: to try even though we may fail, and to accept that fear of failure offers no exemption from hard work. His motif of the “Man in Mud,” first sculpted in 1982 and realized in 20 versions since (including a massive bronze one in his hometown in northwest Germany), splashes through the demanding, beautifully understated retrospective that’s held sway since September at the Museum of Modern Art, and which comes to a close, along with who knows what else, on Inauguration Day.

I want to suggest very humbly, in this new year that does not feel like a fresh start, that Schütte’s half-inhumed human can serve as an emblem: a symbol of incapacity that births a lifetime’s creativity. The heroic statue, striding progressively through history, will not be contemporary again. But a statue can still stand upright, even as the Dreck engulfs him from below.

ImageDetail of “Man in Mud,” 1982/2014; aluminum and steel figure of a man trying to stand upright while half-submerged in mud.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

The Schütte retrospective is MoMA operating at full power, the result of nine years’ effort by the curator Paulina Pobocha, who was recently named the chair of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Pobocha has also edited a very clever catalog, with wise and heartfelt contributions from Schütte’s fellow artists Charles Ray and Marlene Dumas.) When I first saw this show in September, I found it deeply cunning but also downcast, inward-looking — and thought too, mistakenly, that its theoretical heft and ach-so-German humor would struggle to find its audience. There’s a queasy, ornery aspect to Schütte’s figurative sculptures: ceramics of old men in candy-colored hues, or steel casts of reclining women put through the spin cycle. His models of cheap fiberboard and aluminum, which he frequently treats as sculptures in their own right, will not be adapted for an immersive exhibit any time soon.

Yet on repeat visits over the holidays I was delighted to see a tourist-heavy public packing the Schütte show. Dozens of museumgoers were poring over his pained or pinched “Glass Heads,” plopped on steel pedestals like the output of a cartoon guillotine, and gazing up at his “Warriors,” tall but pathetic wooden sentries who wear beer-bottle caps as an alternative to the Prussian spiked helmet. Quietly, this cagey and equivocal show seems to have matured from a retrospective into a prospective, and its restless ambivalence does not feel so insidery anymore.

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