One of the few living artists whose career has spanned nearly a century, Louise Bourgeois, 96, has worked through most of the major avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century, from Surrealism to Conceptual art, while remaining fiercely individualistic and inventive. Often referred to as the "grande dame" of the contemporary art scene, she has inspired generations of artists with her vast range of expression in both form and content. Yet despite her prodigious output, early critical acclaim and astonishing facility with a variety of media—ranging from drawings, paintings and prints to sculptures and installations in such diverse materials as plaster, metal, wood, marble, latex, fabric and found objects—broader recognition came late for Bourgeois. It wasn’t until she was in her 70s that she was "discovered" by the art world, when the Museum of Modern Art organized a retrospective of her art in 1982, its first devoted to the work of a woman artist.

Today, the French-born artist continues to produce refreshingly innovative art with the experimental approach to materials and the obsessive, self-referential subject matter that have become her hallmarks. This year, she is being celebrated with a major international traveling exhibition that includes many of her best-known works made between 1938 and 2007. Organized by the Tate Modern, London, in association with Centre Pompidou, Paris, the exhibition will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from June 27 to September 28. It will wind up its tour at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (October 26, 2008, to January 25, 2009) and at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (February 28, 2009 to June 7, 2009). Also, Bourgeois is exhibiting new works on paper for the first time in "Nature Study" at Inverleith House, Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, though July 6.

Threading throughout Bourgeois’ entire oeuvre is a tale of perpetual metamorphosis, conditioned by her quest for unity and the reconciliation of opposites, whether expressed formally, through the polarities of her often hybrid abstract/figurative imagery, or psychically, through the conflicting forces of her own intense emotions. Drawing upon her memories and personal experiences, specifically the psychological traumas of her childhood, for her subject matter, she explores the fragile tension of being human, exquisitely melding the personal and the universal in an attempt to represent what she has called "the problem of ambivalence." Many of her erotically charged, anthropomorphic sculptures, for example, merge male and female body parts; evoke the conflicting emotions of pleasure and pain or aggression and vulnerability; and comment on the dualisms of self and other, creation and destruction.

However much art critics have analyzed the autobiographical, feminist and sexual underpinnings of her art, Bourgeois herself is insistently pragmatic about her approach. "My art comes out of problems," she says. "How am I going to get rid of this anxiety? How am I going to make myself be loved? I’m interested in structures and strategies for survival. It’s that simple. The feelings and problems of today are connected to the past. My art allows me to follow the thread back to the past, which can hold the clue to understanding what is going on today, right here and now. This is the opposite of nostalgia."

The recurrent themes and obsessions that infuse Bourgeois’ art and her extensive notes and diaries—ranging from fear and fragmentation to abandonment, copulation and reparation—can, indeed, be traced back to her childhood. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois grew up assisting her parents in their antique tapestry restoration firm, training her aesthetic eye while making drawings of the projected tapestry repairs for the weavers. One of her earliest memories of her sculptural inclinations is that of making little figures with bread during not-always-cheerful family dinners. Though she had studied mathematics at the Sorbonne, she set out to become an artist after her mother died in 1932.

In addition to this early loss of her mother, Bourgeois suffered another traumatic childhood situation: Her father had employed his mistress as his children’s live-in tutor, and her mother refused to acknowledge it. Bourgeois later transmuted her vulnerability and rage at that paternal violation into such psychologically disturbing works as "The Destruction of the Father" (1974), a plaster, latex, wood and fabric installation that evokes her family dinner table, unpleasant memories of her father and her own Oedipal, cannibalistic fantasies. In the installation "Cell (Choisy)" (1990–93), a marble model of Bourgeois’ family home in the town of Choisy-le-Roi, sits precariously underneath a large guillotine, which suggests both the destructive potential of families and Bourgeois’ desire to annihilate the past in favor of the present.

Bourgeois studied at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, among other Parisian art schools, and with Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York. There, she mixed with expatriate Surrealists and New York’s cultural elite, while establishing herself as an artist and raising a family. Among her notable early works are "Femmes Maisons" (1945–47), a series of figurative, Surrealist-inspired paintings that explore the contradictory aspects of femininity and the home through architectural metaphors. "Personages" (1947–54), a series of anthropomorphic/abstract wood sculptures that Bourgeois has said represented the people she had left behind in France, marked her shift from painting to sculpture while expressing her concern with relationships between objects and their environments. Regarding her preference for sculpture, Bourgeois says, "The two dimensional does not satisfy me. I need to establish a physical distance, and I need to involve my body. But the body has to be situated somewhere."