Frankenthaler’s breakthrough was palpable in the Denver show. Her work looked like that of no one else, man or woman. But focusing on her revolutionary soak-stains while shutting out all thoughts of credit and sex was hard. Frankenthaler’s reputation may have now eclipsed Louis’s, but why did it take so long? Was it because her work was too delicate? Too figurative? Too tentative? Perhaps Nochlin was onto something when she noted, in Women, Art, and Power (1988), that “the whole art-historical apparatus”—from the museum to the classroom—might be contrived just to keep women “in their place.”

Women artists have been put down in many ways over the years, but the basic technique boils down to this: A critic, a curator, a dealer, or an art historian describes how women paint differently from men, then declares this quality inferior. Women are pegged as controlled, tentative, personal. (For instance, Hartigan recalled in her diary that Clement Greenberg told her women painters were “too easily satisfied” and would make pictures that had a certain “polish.”) Men, meanwhile, are seen as wild and sure, channeling outside forces. (Pollock famously declared, “I am nature.”) In these matchups between alleged feminine and masculine essences, the man typically wins. Finished is not free. Personal is not universal. Nature does not doubt itself.

Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss. It is no accident that “painting like a man” used to be dished out as a supremely delicious compliment. Irving Sandler once asked Hartigan “if a male artist ever told her she painted as well as a man.” She replied tartly, “Not twice.”

I’m happy to report that I was not similarly tormented by “Revolution in the Making,” the exhibition at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel devoted to abstract sculptors, living and dead, working between 1947 and now. This, I should point out, has nothing to do with the quality of the two shows, and everything to do with the very different situation of women sculptors. In abstract sculpture, women are recognized as revolutionaries. As the art historian Anne M. Wagner writes in the exhibition catalog,

There is no question that in the course of the twentieth century, women set sculpture alight, reshaping the terrain so sweepingly that art history is still taking account of the expansion … Today painting remains painting, but sculpture is no longer “itself”: it is no single thing, not necessarily even an object, nothing more (or less) than the inflection of material, place, and space.

The minute I set foot in the exhibition, I could see what she meant. No sculptor in the first gallery made me think of anyone else. It was an undiluted thrill to look around. And the word that kept springing to mind was great. Great. Great. Great.

The first objects I encountered were Louise Bourgeois’ Personages. These abstract pieces of carefully hacked-up painted wood, made between the mid‑’40s and the mid-’50s, stand up like and stand in for people. They are funny, touching, and lonely. You feel you could mingle with them, which is what Bourgeois intended (although that was not so easy here, where they were grouped on a pedestal). As Elizabeth A. T. Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, writes in the catalog, Bourgeois made her “figures both abstract enough and individual enough to exist in imaginary relationships to one another, and to viewers.” They have a tribal look in both senses of the word.

© Lee Bontecou; David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University / gift of Viki List from the Albert A. List Family Collection; photograph courtesy David Winton Bell Gallery

Moving around the gallery, I could see the works of Lee Bontecou jutting from the walls. These are so strange that I’d hesitate to call them sculptures. But they aren’t really paintings, either. They are more like organs—mouths, orifices, jagged spaces—that project from the walls. Most of them are dark and vaguely threatening. They look like they might swallow you up if you get too close. Bontecou’s method was quirky as well. “She adopted a manner of working that would become her signature style—welding lightweight steel frameworks, onto which she grafted fragments of canvas and cloth, tied in place by small pieces of twisted wire,” Smith explains in the catalog. This changed the game of sculpture. Bontecou fused the industrial techniques of welding and building with softer techniques, such as sewing and tying. And whereas Pollock moved painting from the wall to the floor, Bontecou “moved sculpture from the floor to the wall,” Smith observes, where it hovers “ambiguously between two and three dimensions.”