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For a long time the story took the focus from the inventive areas into which Ms. Bourgeois was pushing sculpture, such as the walk-in spiraling rooms she called cells. These were hermetic universes enclosed in old doors or cable fencing, and furnished with sculptures that might as likely consist of a marble house threatened by a guillotine as large glass globes perched docilely on a ring of chairs.

She has always refused to talk about her sculptural innovations. It was the psychological process that interested her, the intensity of childhood fears that drove her and they all seemed to have to do with her father.

Then, as the American representative at the Venice Biennale in 1993, she showed a sculpture of glass suction cups on a slab of stone, in memory of teenage hours when she had to cup her sick mother's back. Soon after that she began bringing crocheted collars and old haute couture clothes to the studio. She also started talking about France and her mother, about the seamstresses who worked upstairs and the women her mother oversaw downstairs in the family's tapestry-restoration studio.

It was about this time she began to make cells with skeins of thread, embroidery and clothes. She drew spiders and then transformed them into sculptures, in memory of the spiders in Connecticut when her own three boys were young. These spiders, her story went, were protective and friendly and ate mosquitoes.

For Picasso it was a new mistress who ushered in a new body of work. For Ms. Bourgeois it was an alteration in the direction of her memories. From remembering her mother, she remembered herself as a mother, complex as a spider, at once protective and threatening. The spiders helped bring her story up to date, to herself as an adult with children of her own and her own mistakes to resolve.

The reality of her adult life became the theme of the three looming towers that dominated the opening of the Tate Modern in London last year. Viewers stood in line to climb the spiral staircases and see themselves distorted in mirrors at the top. They descended inside, discovering intimate sculptures. Titles were etched on the tower bases: "I Do," "I Undo," "I Redo." They spoke of regret and second chances.

"I do, I undo, I redo," she repeated, as she began to emphasize the red on a drawing of three small trapezoids and one large one. "It is a very positive attitude. I am an optimist," she said, which might come as a surprise to followers of her work. "So everything turns out O.K."

So O.K. that she can even talk about her husband, the curator and art historian Robert Goldwater, whose prominence overshadowed hers before his death in 1973. In the past, mention of his name brought an end to the conversation.

"This is very personal," she said of her trapezoid drawing. "This represents Robert, my husband, and his three sons. It means I'm not that bad because I gave three sons to my husband."

She lifted her pen and regarded it for a moment. "Bad? No. I mean, I'm not that useless."

She paused. "Do you hear the children playing in the schoolyard?" she asked. "I live in a very interesting spot. There is an Episcopal church in front which makes a food distribution, and in back I live where the children play. I have the voice of the children all day.`

Upstairs is a pet she feeds regularly. It settled in about the time her spiders arrived at Rockefeller Center. It is a living spider in a web.