Viewed from one angle, he’s the ur-humanist of 20th-century creatives: the man who declared that everyone from the plumber to the painter was an artist, the man who dispensed with entry requirements for his art classes and lost his teaching position for it. From another position he’s the impenetrable pinnacle of what people deride as modern art’s worst excesses; his conversing with dead animals and hosting boxing matches are the more accessible entries in a body of work he created under an “extended definition of art.” He’s a self-declared shaman who survived a military plane crash and certain death in the wilderness thanks to the intercession of Tartars who wrapped him in felt and animal fat—and he’s a charlatan because he made up the story to expand his own self-aggrandizing mythos. He’s an artist at the nexus of seismic movements and creators of his time—John Cage, Nam June Paik, Fluxus, Sigmar Polke—but his impact today is less apparent than that of his many collaborators and protégés.

He’s also the subject of a hefty exhibition currently on view at the Broad, “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature.” Curated by the museum’s Sarah Loyer with scholar Andrea Gyorody, the show, like Beuys himself, promises one thing, reveals itself to be another, and deep down aims at something entirely different.

In texts and promotional materials, the museum says the presentation “emphasizes Beuys’s commitment to environmental justice” via “over 400 artworks that illuminate Beuys’s practice as a model for direct environmental action.” And the show certainly highlights this facet of Beuys’s rambling career, especially by examining his “7000 Oaks” project, in which the artist planted that staggering amount of trees—each accompanied by a memorial-like stone marker—across Kassel, Germany. His final major work, it grappled with memories of World War II and the destructive horrors of that conflict (the artist himself was in the Hitler Youth and served in the Luftwaffe), as well as the environmental harms he saw befalling the world around him when it was launched in 1982.

Joseph Beuys’s ‘Rhine Water Polluted’ (1981). Photo: Joshua White/ARS, N.Y.

There is more than enough material to construct a show solely around Beuys as an eco crusader. We see posters advertising the project; photographs and films chronicling it; documents and ephemera related to the German Green Party—of which he was a founding member, running unsuccessfully for office—and items pertaining to another long-running environmentally focused series he created in Italy. But the organizers of the exhibition have sown their curatorial seeds well beyond this area, and the show takes a much broader view of the man and his art.

It more widely concerns his works in multiples. Most commonly thought of as prints, lithographs, etchings and the like, the term can be applied to any art produced in editions, and the variety of objects on view evinces just how wide-ranging art multiples can be. There are works on paper, but also a series of felt suits he produced, as well as an empty box that invite viewers to fill it with their “intuition,” bottles of polluted water from the Rhine, tapes, films, plastic bags and more.

The dizzying array and number of objects on view make you wonder if anyone in Germany didn’t own a Beuys work at some point, but that expansiveness was part of the driving force behind his interwoven notion of art and politics—that turning everyday objects into art imbued them with special meaning. So a political pamphlet that normally would be quickly tossed in the trash after it was given to you on the street becomes a revered object worthy of preservation and study.

While the show doesn’t take a stance on the efficacy of this strategy—the Greens, for example, struggled during Beuys’s lifetime, but would go on to be part of later coalition governments—the survival of so many arguably unremarkable items testifies to the fact that, even if people were hesitant to grab hold of his ideas, plenty were happy to snatch up the items that Beuys was offering. Postcards, erasers, wash basins, newspapers, manifestos, customer-survey cards, torn paper plates: Beuys wasn’t hesitant to stamp his name on just about anything if it meant getting his message—and by extension, himself—into wider circulation.

‘Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature’ is currently on view at the Broad. Photo: Joshua White/The Broad

The result is that this show persuasively if unintentionally argues that Beuys was many things: a philosopher and theorist; an expert marketer; a firebrand with the canny ability to attract attention. But great artist is not among them; he ruled over a realm of ideas and possibility, but creations and execution were not his domain. That is why the more fleshed-out items here are the most satisfying: a sled decorated with felt and fat commemorating his plane crash; a lightbulb screwed into a lemon—a lighthearted search for green power. They bring a grounding element to an otherwise academic affair that leaves one feeling like a book rather than an exhibition would be the best way to engage with his work.

The show probes so many aspects of Beuys’s life and work that it seems truly to aspire to a career-spanning retrospective. The inclusion of a handful of one-off and early works (a selection of the latter can be seen in photographs from a 1961 portfolio included in his application for a professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf) would have opened the aperture all the way, allowing us to better observe an artist whose mercurial nature is so difficult to capture. When it comes to such creators, curators have a thankless job and often—as is the case here—their displays will fail to convert any visitors not already invested in the particular individual’s creative project. That said, as a portrait of Beuys and his ideas, the show is strong but inscrutable, doing more than is promised while coming up short of its full ambitions. In that sense, it’s an apt homage to its subject.