The art of the past is accessible, but Modern and contemporary art are difficult and obtuse, even confrontational — or so the myth goes. Recent art, that myth contends, is personal and subjective (whatever you want it to be), as opposed to universal, and abstraction has no subject and, therefore, no content.

But that same myth suggests also that to be successfully brought to the masses, the art of the last 100 years must appeal to our insatiable thirst for entertainment and to our increasingly fast-paced sensibilities and shorter attention spans. All of this may be why the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, the subject of a full-career retrospective that opens tomorrow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is almost universally embraced as the reigning grand dame of the art world.

Now in her 97th year, Ms. Bourgeois, who has been making art for more than seven decades, qualifies as both Modern and contemporary, and her art’s provocative, barefaced content — personal, confessional, bitter, feminist, nurturing, overtly sexual, and confrontational — hits you with mallet force, its subject matter long ringing both between your legs and between your ears.

Working with marble, wood, plaster, wire, steel, latex, fabric, resin, and bronze, as well as with numerous found objects such as Victorian memorabilia, vintage textiles, surgical instruments, and old doors, Ms. Bourgeois has embraced metaphors of growth and family, totems and prisons, betrayal and revenge, sexual union and sacrificial ritual.

Her recurring forms are spiders, flora and fauna, breasts, phalluses and vulvas, cocoons, pods, totems, and cages. And there is little ambiguity to their genesis, meaning, and dénouement. In Ms. Bourgeois’s art, the spider’s web is often synonymous with the tapestry and the womb. The figure — strange yet familiar; intimate yet distant — is a phallus inspiring lust, a relic to be worshipped, and an animal or weapon to be feared. The home is a prison and a torture chamber; and the family, no less than love, communion, and sexual longing, is woven together by strands that bind, suffocate, and kill.

Ms. Bourgeois, who was born in Paris on Christmas Day in 1911, and who moved in 1938 to New York, where she continues to live and to sculpt, appears to be able to do it all. And this must be part of her wide appeal. She makes sculptures that are close to her Modernist European heart, works that speak to the influences of Brancusi, Arp, Moore, Noguchi, and Calder; and, in true American fashion, she can also, leaving formalism far behind, telegraph her feelings, throw emotional tantrums, and belt it all out.

Ms. Bourgeois moves easily between figuration and abstraction, between small, personal, and fragile works — sculptures you feel inclined to protect and hold near — to Surreal and overblown, melodramatic theatrics — environmental sculptures, lit by colored lights, that look like MTV video props or cheesy Broadway stage sets.

This exhibition gives us a full range from the earliest to the most recent drawings, paintings, and sculpture of the artist’s oeuvre, but I have seen her work look much better than it does in this retrospective, which feels thin, as well as too even in tempo and scale. Except for one large installation, “Confrontation” (1978), most of the sculptures do not get larger than medium in scale (Ms. Bourgeois’s spiders can be 35 feet tall, and her environmental cages can take up entire galleries). Another problem at the Guggenheim is that most of the sculptures are pushed against the walls, which limits to one view the reading of works that should be seen in the round. And some of the sculptures are grouped unwittingly together in Wright’s alcoves, which turns individual sculptures into elements of unintentional installations.

Still, there is much worthwhile to be seen here. The show begins with one of Ms. Bourgeois’s signature works, a medium-scaled “Spider Couple” (2003) and two hanging, polished aluminum spirals. (I have always thought the “Spiders” look best outside, especially in nature, where they assuage their sci-fi associations.) The neo-baroque spirals, hanging above the spiders like decoys or captured prey, resemble wrapped cocoons or gleaming, silver excrement, or soft-serve ice cream, and they immediately set up the themes of the exhibition — the similarities between the comforts of home and the threats of the wild, the traps of trust, family, sex, and love, and the dance between the hunter and the hunted.

Moving up the Guggenheim’s ramp, we see her early, rather mediocre Surrealist paintings, inspired by de Chirico, as well as the artist’s small, tabletop sculptures, all from the 1940s. In the High Gallery is a grouping of Ms. Bourgeois’s “Personages” — the slender, carved wooden totems that were inspired by primitive sculpture, Giacometti, and Noguchi. Approximately 20 of these works, many of them individually strong, are grouped together, all facing toward us like startled deer. They are both too distant and cramped too close together. You have to work hard here, as their individuality is canceled out by the overwhelming sense of the group.

Also on view are Ms. Bourgeois’s stacked wooden sculptures from the 1950s, pedestrian works in which dozens of forms are threaded onto a single steel rod; the often surprising, “clustered” floor or tabletop sculptures, comprising numerous wooden or marble fronds, that suggest garden and family, and a number of “Cells,” or monastic cages — the lonely, circular, claustrophobic environments made of doors, windows, and mirrors and occupied by sculptures, artifacts, and empty furniture. Installed chronologically, the exhibition concludes with recent figurative works stitched together from scraps of cloth.

The best works, though, are the smaller sculptures, many of them made of wood or marble. Two long, slender works, both titled “Femme Couteau” (1969-70 and 1982), in pinkish marble, suggest tongue, bone, genitals, weapon, flayed fish, and Cycladic idol. “Nature Study” (1984-94) resembles a headless, many-breasted Sphinx or skinned dog. In the tradition of Arp, the sculpture, though much more literal and illustrative, continually rises and transforms itself. Tail becomes root, which penetrates and re-emerges as phallus. Breasts become legs and knees, shifting shoulders into hips and torso into neck. “Fillette” (1968), a hanging penis and scrotum in rough-hewn latex, on the other hand, despite its striking resemblance to a duck hanging in the window of a Chinatown restaurant, is too phallic and literal. It cannot redeem itself beyond castration. This melodramatic literalness is Ms. Bourgeois’s Achilles heel.

The difficulty with Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures is that the works — the good and the bad — feel trumped by the life that brought them to fruition. The story of Ms. Bourgeois’s life is both the glue and the stumbling block of her entire oeuvre.

When Ms. Bourgeois is good (and she can be very, very good), the infamous, psychologically traumatizing, and defining story of her life — that her father firmly ensconced his mistress in their family home under the false pretense that she was Louise’s governess — overshadows and muddles the work: We feel obligated to treat the sculptures as illustrations of her hatred of her father, her confusions regarding home, love, and sex, and her sense of betrayal. And when her sculpture is bad (and it can be very, very bad), the story of her life feels like an excuse for art that amounts to little more than therapeutic exorcism.

The myth of the artist, and of the genesis of her art, takes center stage at a retrospective where the sculpture is often much more interesting. The strangest part, however, is that the artist, no less than the Guggenheim, perpetuates the myth. Ms. Bourgeois’s art is as much about her own inability to break free from her past as it is about the story that inspired her art in the first place.

June 27 until September 28 (1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).