The National Gallery’s small but potent Lynda Benglis exhibition makes no mention of a 1974 work that rocked the art world. In November of that year, Benglis bought ad space in Artforum, and used the magazine to display a picture of herself naked, oiled, wearing sunglasses and clutching a generously proportioned dildo at her crotch. Several of the journal’s editors denounced it as cheap, vulgar and self-promotional. They were so incensed that they resigned and founded another journal, October, which remains an influential voice among old-guard supporters of the avant-garde.

Today, Benglis’s naked portrait is understood as a key work not just in her career, but also in the discourse of feminism, sexuality, gender, pop art and larger debates about the purpose and power of overt provocation. It has been reclaimed by some as a marker of empowerment and by others as a critical satire of male bravado and tawdry, art-world branding.

A reproduction of it doesn’t appear in the National Gallery show devoted to the American sculptor and visual artist, who was born in 1941. That’s not surprising. Even today, it’s best to put an NSFW warning if you send or post a link to it. And its absence from an exhibition that surveys 33 works from 1966 to 2003 isn’t necessarily censorship. Sometimes artists are overdefined by a single work, event or statement, which functions like a gravity bomb, making everything else seem a mere satellite to a single data point.

The exhibition, organized by curator Molly Donovan and drawing heavily on works donated by the irrepressible collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, was lightly traveled when I saw it earlier this month. So I decided to take advantage of the quiet and see the show twice, once while pretending to be ignorant of the Artforum fracas, and again with that event exerting its usual pull on how we think of Benglis’s oeuvre.

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Of course, you can’t “unknow” something any more than you can unsee it, but if you put the Artforum thing mostly out of mind, Benglis’s work seems fixated on materials and form, especially formal responses to abstract expressionism, minimalism and the industrial chic that has haunted sculpture for much of the past century. Two gorgeous 1966 pieces, “In the Beginning” and “Wax Painting,” are small and rectangular, just a foot long. Their size, their subtlety, their lack of any representational material and their use of monochromatic wax and encaustic all seem to suggest an effort to domesticate the male-dominated world of abstract expressionism.

But no sooner does that loaded word — domesticate — cross the mind than you begin confronting gender questions. Why is domestication, with its suggestion of making something small, homey and tame, associated with feminine things? Why is scale so loaded with gendered ideas, that men make big works and women make small ones? Why is abstraction often associated with male-inflected industrial things and materials, like house paint and hot lead, and industrial processes like distilling, refining, abrading and polishing? And why does work that is tactile, flexible, textured and sinuous often get labeled inherently feminine?

In both of these small wax paintings, the artist has drawn or etched a rectangular shape around the edges, a frame within the frame, as if you are viewing their watery play of colors through the square format of a camera’s viewfinder. There’s a delightfully coy gesture in that: If these were in fact photographs, you would have absolutely no sense of how big the originals were. They could be the size of billboards or postage stamps. And that leaves you thinking that Benglis hasn’t so much domesticated abstract expressionism as sampled it, or contained it.

Again, looking at the work apart from the controversy of almost 50 years ago, you notice how deeply engaged it is with the history of 20th-century art. Another of Benglis’s early paintings, an untitled 1968 work made of colored latex poured onto the floor, seems as much about Jasper Johns’s target paintings as it does about the work Jackson Pollock made by flinging paint onto canvas laid on the floor. The oozing mass of material has radiating rings of color, as if one of Johns’s targets has melted like Salvador Dali’s clock faces and slid cartoonlike to the floor. And there it sits, thick and insistent, perhaps a riposte to the watery washes of color that had made Helen Frankenthaler an art-world celebrity by the mid-1960s.

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Now let’s go back through the exhibition with the Artforum controversy more in the foreground. The editors who denounced Benglis in 1974 called the magazine image “an object of extreme vulgarity.” Vulgarity is also a loaded word, suggesting both an affinity with pornography and with things that are cheap, decorative or low class. Benglis has embraced all of that in different ways in her work, including pieces that are gilded with gold leaf, or use glitter, or are so brightly colored they seem intentionally designed to provoke an unruly dissonance in the eyes.

With the shadow of that rubber dildo in mind, there’s a shift in the demands that Benglis’s work makes on us. It becomes not just a dialogue with other artists, past and present, but an engaged and confrontational dialogue. It doesn’t let you off the hook. She is not only raising questions about the scale of abstract expressionist canvases, she’s cutting them down to size. She isn’t just riffing off Pollock or Johns or Frankenthaler, she’s using glops of paint on the floor to ask a hard and painful question: What if there’s no difference between paint that happens to fall on the floor, and a painting an artist makes by letting it fall on the floor?

All of the idle but intriguing questions about the gendered nature of certain materials and processes now become more than speculation, more insistent, more demanding: Can we see the art from some point of view that is beyond gender, beyond the societally imposed burden of male and female, with all their accompanying stereotypes? Benglis spent more than 30 years in a relationship with a man she met while working in India, and yet, seeing her work today, it seems more queer than that of many artists who identify as LGBT. It scrambles gender and disrupts it, and a curious thing happens: Things that aren’t supposed to be pretty can be pretty, and things that are presumed to be weak take on new kinds of strength.

The National Gallery’s Benglis exhibition shows us enough of her work to give us a sense of how complex and adventurous it is. But its power is also linked to the daring role the artist staked out for herself in works like the Artforum image of 1974. I don’t honestly know how I would have reacted had I been a critic then, and I don’t think it is her best work. But it is essential, and it’s history, and far from holding her back, it seems to have propelled her forward through a lifetime of productivity and adventure.

Lynda Benglis Through Jan. 2 at the National Gallery of Art. nga.gov.

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