Art: an immense endeavor. Praise be.

But what if you were to recognize the narrowness, the futility of this endeavor, the vanity of reproducing merely the visible? What if you focused instead on what cannot be seen, on things invisible or not yet visible — or on the very shiver of becoming?

You would be a philosopher. Or then again, you might be Paul Klee.

Klee (1879-1940) is the subject of a captivating show at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. Comprising loans from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and from a host of US museums (many of them New England college museums), “Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art” was organized by John Sallis, a professor of philosophy at BC.

It looks at Klee’s work in the context of philosophy, particularly the 20th-century philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Walter Benjamin. All three admired and wrote about Klee.

Like many of the philosophers who engaged with him, Klee’s art is always playing havoc with intelligibility. His art can seem as modest and straightforward as a child’s diagram. But look closer and try to parse the diagram, and you succumb to the strange sensation of being completely alone and utterly in the dark.

Don’t be afraid. Stay there. It’s good.

The implication, of course, as far as Klee was concerned, was that intelligibility itself was suspect. Man was too hung up, he felt, on the visible world. In his view, “the visible is only an isolated example and . . . other latent truths are in the majority.”

This belief made itself felt all through his art, but notably in work that concerned itself with the natural world. In “Perception of an Animal,” for instance, Klee draws an animal’s head and, above it, a set of lenses and a magnifying glass. He is toying with the notion that animals perceive the world in ways that differ dramatically from our own perceptions.

In “Green Terrain,” we might be reminded of a conventional landscape (it’s green if nothing else). But the effect is more of a kind of energy, a freshness, an experience of the landscape in time, a view that evolves in tandem with feelings and forces both terrestrial and cosmic.

For Klee, nothing was fixed, nothing sacred. Fundamentals of our perceptual world might be regarded as mere toys, props from a fairy tale — as in the 1940 drawing “The Moon as Toy.”

Klee was born in Switzerland but lived most of his life in Germany. He was a central, yet always idiosyncratic figure in modern art. Even as the push toward abstraction in art was underway, he saw that representation and abstraction were not opposites. They were on a continuum. Not a one-dimensional continuum, but (as in paintings such as “Printed Sheet With Pictures”) a spreading web of visual possibilities that included diagrams, letters and language, pictographs and symbols, colors, and textures, all of which might carry meaning — or just as good, defeat meaning.

For 10 years Klee was associated with the Bauhaus, a German school of architecture and industrial design that fostered some of the most influential modern artists, designers, and architects. His habits of inquiry and pedagogy did not originate there — they seem to have been innate. But they were certainly encouraged in that hothouse atmosphere of experimentation and learning. (One of the more absorbing parts of the show is a glass-covered table holding selections of Klee’s teaching tools: teaching diagrams, lecture notes, and so on.)

The exhibit is not lacking in pedagogical impulses itself. It is divided into eight sections, each of which groups together drawings, prints, and paintings that relate to a given theme: Klee’s dialogues with nature, for instance; his interest in questions of genesis; his engagement with flight, movement and balance; his interest in words and music; and his concern with politics and death.