Over the years, I’ve been both convinced and irritated by Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures, compelled and repulsed, fascinated and enraged, often at the same time and, on occasion, by the same piece. I remember being puzzled, at her 1983 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, by the contradiction between the single-mindedness of her themes and the scattiness with which she found ways of embodying them. The range of conceptions was fairly narrow, the range of materials, both traditional and non-traditional, very wide, and the range of invention, to put it delicately, erratic. At times, Bourgeois seemed to have tapped deep wells of feeling and to have given them form in ways that made ideology irrelevant. At others, her reputation appeared to have more to do with her presentation of herself as what might be called a marginalized, victimized female artist than with any achievement as a sculptor.

It’s not entirely Bourgeois’s fault, of course, that her lifelong (and frequently stated) obsessions—her own sexuality, her own body, her relationship to her parents, her sense of isolation and oppression—have been claimed by feminist critics as paradigmatic of their concerns, any more than it is her fault that her longtime interest in materials as disparate as latex, wax, marble, bronze, and scavenged wood has been hailed by postmodernist commentators as a rejection of modernist practice. It hasn’t hurt, mind you—although I suppose that it is churlish to begrudge Bourgeois, who is now eighty-two, the attention and recognition that she has been