By Glen Helfand

ONE OF THE major appeals of the breathtaking Eva Hesse retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the pleasure of narrative. Not just in the artist's tragic biography – the Jewish, German-born American artist's family had to flee the Nazis when Hesse was a child, and her condensed, decade-long career was abbreviated by a brain tumor that killed her at 34. The equally compelling story here is the unfolding of Hesse's artistic development. With remarkable clarity, the show follows the steps that formed a unique and powerful vision that is as disturbing as it is formally seductive.

Hesse made art at a time of social and artistic change, when clearly identified, male-dominated movements such as pop art and minimalism were still battling with the legacy of abstract expressionism. Hesse aimed to create something that synthesized those art-world signifiers into something all her own. That is, sculptures that blur the distinctions between the geometric and the organic, the corporeal and the industrial, the ugly and the beautiful. The show's many galleries successively illustrate Hesse's significant artistic leaps.

Starting with the mildly interesting drawings and paintings of the early 1960s and following her increasing success in the realm of sculpture, the drama builds continuously. When Hesse hits her stride in the mid '60s, a period represented by a gallery of fetishistic rope-wrapped objects, the power of her innovation kicks in and never lets up for the next three-quarters of the exhibition. Whether you like her work or not, it doesn't take long before you're in awe of her achievements and still-pervasive influence.

The surprise of this exhibition is how gorgeous it is. Hesse's work, when seen only a piece of two at a time, exudes a dour tone because of her preference for phlegm-colored materials such as latex and fiberglass – by 1965 color is completely absent from her work – as well as its intentional ungainliness. With 150 of Hesse's pieces on display here, the only U.S. stop for this show, it's easy to see how her formal inventiveness and rigorous intention to create new forms and vocabularies resulted in a body of work with undeniable visual appeal.

In the exhibition's hefty, handsome catalog, Hesse's pal, artist Mel Bochner, is quoted saying, "The thing that I don't think anybody writing about Hesse's work has picked up on yet is not the pain, not the suffering, not the anxiety, not the absurdity, but the joy of the work ... the light that it emits." This is where cocurators Elisabeth Sussman and Renate Petzinger (of Museum Wiesbaden in Germany) take their cue, elegantly organizing the works into rooms that follow the chronology while revealing the golden, tactile beauty that so confidently emerges.

The meaning of Hesse's seemingly abstract work is another story. She mined a realm of ambivalence and paradox. Her sculptures respond to the rigid geometry of minimalism by adding unruly tangles of cord – as in her 1966 piece Metronomic Irregularity III, in which a series of squares with a switchboard-like matrix of holes has been threaded with cotton-covered wire. It looks like a sleek grid that's sprouted unruly hair, perfectly mucking with the notion of perfection. This kind of tension, between rigid geometry and limp, dangling elements, occurs often in her work and always gets under your skin. Untitled or Not Yet, the 1966 sculpture in SFMOMA's own collection, is a series of mesh net bags filled with what looks like wadded plastic that hang from the wall like droopy, teardrop-shaped sacks of flesh pulled by gravity. They're insidiously quotidian and uncomfortably physical objects.

Such sculptures invite feminist readings, but those readings are not wholly satisfying. Hesse predated the women's movements of the '70s, working contemporaneously with minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, whose surfaces are uninflected, eternal stainless steel rectangles and cubes. Hesse's work seems a response in her celebration of the tactile and use of materials that she knew would degrade. Her once somewhat pristine latex and fiberglass pieces have mellowed with age into a range of beiges and brackish browns. Many are in serious states of decay and could not be included in the exhibition.

Yet Hesse's work, for all its physicality and delicacy, is not confessional or expressionistic. Her sculptures are not stereotypically female structures, either, transcending gender conventions in their unseemliness and limited palette. While seminal works such as the turning-point 1965 relief Ringaround Arosie, which finds the artist breaking free from two-dimensional pieces, evoke a woman's breast, the artist seems to dare her viewers to interpret her thoughts about that reference.

There is, however, a dazzling clarity to Hesse's artistic output. Right After, a 1969 piece in the gallery of fiberglass works, is a breathtaking example of her ability to work with both disparate order and crystalline chaos. The sculpture is a hanging tangle of looping strands of transparent fiberglass and resin. It looks soft and weightless but is actually a solid, brittle form. It's a monumental work that is delicately seductive, a powerfully ambiguous web that you'll gladly get caught up in.