A photograph of the artist Ruth Asawa and four of her six children, taken at her home by Imogen Cunningham in 1957, shows a scene of working life. In the foreground are Asawa’s hanging multilobed sculptures; Asawa, wearing old tennis shoes and stretched-out socks, her face obscured by her sculpture, is making a looped-wire basket around a baby who has improbably just crawled into it; nearby, a daughter dutifully loops wire onto a dowel, while two boys, one wearing an apron, sit peacefully in the background. One possible interpretation: a feminist art fantasy, home and work brought together at last. Another: an artist among her many creations. Another: a mother, trying against all odds to make her art. Another, jealous: How on Earth did she manage it? Another, cautionary: This is what you have to be able to do to have both.

It’s a remarkable image, and trying to sort your feelings about it can show how vexed motherhood has been and still is for so many women artists—the “awful dichotomy,” as the painter Alice Neel called it, between art-making and caretaking. But Asawa wanted six children, and she also wanted to be an artist. It is testament to her character that she refused to see these desires as incompatible, despite a modern art establishment that largely agreed with Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Albert Ten Eyck Gardner when he wrote in 1948 that “the greatest contribution to the world of art that could be made by a woman was to be the mother of a genius.”

Can you be a real artist and a good mother? There are as many answers to the question as there are artists who can become pregnant. In an energizing and brilliant new monograph, Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury, art historian Jordan Troeller figures Asawa as the center of a community of San Francisco “artist-mothers,” a figure whose example offers a powerful correction to the history of modern art. The artist-mother is not a lone artist endeavoring to perfect a finished work but an artist working within a community, devoted to art-making as an ongoing process, a gift to the future rather than an argument with the past.

“Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Modern Art, following its opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the latest in a cascade of shows since her death at the age of 87 in 2013, and is remarkable for conveying the breadth of Asawa’s art practice—how it overlapped with family and with community, how it emerged from the broken rhythms of daily life, how it was powered by a lifelong fascination with form. While her wire sculptures and her civic fountains are her best-known works, Asawa drew daily, painted, made lithographs, shaped clay. She rarely gave any of her works titles, more interested, it seems, in the constant process of creation than in final work. She helped found one of the most vibrant public school arts programs in the country and was the force behind the establishment of the San Francisco School of the Arts, a public high school. She and her husband, the architect Albert Lanier, raised their children in a house full of art-being-made. The doors at her home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley were rarely locked: Her son Paul remembers, “People would just walk in.”

Formed out of the swirl of daily life, the resulting works have all the beauty of objects with a life of their own. Her sculptures seem to breathe. Her hanging looped-wire forms, rounded and organic as gourds, fluted as seashells, turn slowly as you watch them. They move out of the corner of the eye, and you wonder if they will grow a new lobe while you stand there, a fruiting body. Like all living things, they seem to need space, company, and sunlight.

One of the many wonderful things about this thoughtfully curated show is that it captures the feeling of a growing thing: You enter the show not in a big bravura act but sideways, through a kind of antechamber of the artist’s early works. The first thing you see is quiet: an early looped-wire basket, self-satisfied as a sea urchin. The art in these first rooms can feel jumbled, too many small pieces rattling around in a too-big space. But turn around, and there it is: a big skylighted room with only Asawa’s hanging sculptures, an........

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