Louise Bourgeois, one of the great 20th century sculptors, was known for her works’ sexuality, aggression, sense of confinement and grotesque imagery. But the diminutive, French-born American wasn’t really widely known until a 1982 retrospective. Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, spoke to NPR’s Neda Ulaby. He called her an artist’s artist — well-respected but obscure.

After that retrospective, Strick says, it was “recognized that here was this absolutely major artist whose work had anticipated many of the movements that had followed her.”

Louise Bourgeois, Cell (You Better Grow Up), 1993, part of the Cindy and Howard Rachofsky Collection, donated to the Dallas Museum of Art