Working well into her nineties, Bourgeois kept churning out the sculptures that made her one of the most famous American artists of the past 30 years. She passed away in 2010.

Born in Paris to parents who restored tapestries for a living, Bourgeois ended up moving to New York in 1938 with her American husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. Her first solo exhibition of Abstract Expressionist paintings appeared at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1945. Not long after, she transitioned to sculpture, first using wood to create totemic shapes such as "Spiral Woman"—a six-foot abstraction of a moving female figure—and later using bronze and marble to forge darker pieces like 1967's "The End of Softness." In the 1960s, she flirted with the idea of becoming a child psychologist. She stuck with art, obviously, but her sculptures often draw on memories of her childhood and symbolize sexuality interplayed with innocence. More recently, massive creepy sculptures of spiders had become her signature.

Bourgeois was the subject of a retrospective at the MoMA in New York in 1982, represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and had a major retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2008. Although she died of heart failure in 2010, she continued working until the very end of her ninety-eight years, completing pieces the week before she died. [Image via Getty]