We walked into “The Dinner Party” accompanied by Chicago’s husband and constant companion, the photographer Donald Woodman, who that day played the part of a benign bodyguard. Chicago regarded her creation with the fierce and slightly bemused love of a parent for a grown child. The work is so thoroughly assimilated into art history that its authority feels like a given, but Chicago remains protective of it. She vividly remembers its difficult birth — the years of painstaking labor, the organizing, over five years, of a volunteer force of 400 to help her, the doubt about whether it would ever be finished and the eventual triumph of its debut. Chicago’s intention, she told me — with a mixture of self-deprecation and utter seriousness — had been to rededicate the history of Western civilization to the women who are often left out of it. She wanted to make a work so large that it could never be erased. When I asked her what it was like to be in the presence of the piece now, sadness crept into her voice. She said she felt relief. “From the beginning, you know, I was determined — it needed to be permanently housed, because if it hadn’t been, it would have simply reiterated the story of erasure it recounts. It just — I had no idea it was going to take this long.”

Image The October 1970 advertisement Judy Chicago placed in Artforum announcing both her one-woman show at California State University, Fullerton (Artforum ran the boxing ring photograph later that year), as well as her name change from Gerowitz (which belonged to her first husband) to Chicago; she wanted to be free of any kind of male-dominated nomenclature. Credit... Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives

WHEN “THE DINNER PARTY” was first shown in San Francisco, over 100,000 people came to see it in the three months it was on display. Chicago was feted in national magazines and interviewed on the radio. She received letters from women all over the country telling her how moved they were by the piece, how it had changed their lives. But a backlash was brewing. Colleagues whispered that it was not a work of art but a piece of clumsy political rhetoric. A Los Angeles Times art critic cruelly bashed it, calling it “a lumbering mishmash of sleaze and cheese.” The tour of the show was canceled, with minimal explanation.

Chicago was shocked. To be rejected by the art world was a refutation of her identity. She’d studied art since she was 5 years old, and had been one of the few women to gain recognition in the 1960s L.A. art scene. For her, “The Dinner Party” was the culmination of a process of radical self-transformation. She retreated to her modest studio in a small town outside San Francisco, $30,000 in debt from loans she’d taken out to pay for the work’s completion, and spent the rest of the summer alone. “The Dinner Party” was taken apart, boxed up and put into storage.

For years, the gulf between popular adulation and critical dismissal of “The Dinner Party” persisted. Over the next two decades, it was largely ignored by American art institutions. (An exception was the Brooklyn Museum, which showed it in 1980, prompting a nasty review in The New York Times by Hilton Kramer, who plainly disdained the work’s vaginal imagery.) But thanks to the strenuous efforts of Diane Gelon, who had been the project coordinator on “The Dinner Party,” it was shown all over the country in alternative venues — the top floor of an office building in Chicago, the Cyclorama in Boston — and supported by donors, from the Rockefellers to women who sent Chicago five dollars because they thought the work was revolutionary. Slowly, “The Dinner Party” was reinscribed into art history. In 2002, when it was acquired and again shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Roberta Smith, an art critic for The Times, pithily summarized its jagged reception. “Call it what you will: kitsch, pornography, artifact, feminist propaganda or a major work of 20th-century art,” she wrote. “It doesn’t make much difference. ‘The Dinner Party’ … is important.”