Often there was a precise association in her work. After she had created a number of vertical spirals that seemed to twist in space, she evoked childhood memories of the tapestry business and her family: “When a tapestry had to be washed in the river, it took four people to hoist it out and twist it. Twisting is very important for me. When I dreamt of getting rid of the mistress, it was by twisting her neck.”

At the age of 20, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, disciplines that she valued for their stability. “I got peace of mind,” she later said, “only through the study of rules nobody could change.” But she left to enroll in a succession of art schools, and counted Fernand Léger among her teachers.

In 1938 she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian noted for his pioneering work in the field then referred to as primitive art. They moved to New York City that same year, and Ms. Bourgeois attended the Art Students League, where she studied painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and also produced sculpture and prints.

She knew many of the European surrealists then arriving as refugees in New York (she later dismissed them as “smart alecks”), but the artists to whom she felt closest were the American painters who would come to be known as Abstract Expressionists.

Ms. Bourgeois had a solo show of paintings in New York in 1945 and her first exhibition of sculpture — an installation of tall, polelike figures that she intended as abstract portraits of family members and friends — four years later at the Peridot Gallery, at which time she gave up painting for good.

She enjoyed some professional success as a sculptor thereafter (she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition almost yearly until 1962). But a significant shift in her career came in 1966, when she was included in an exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, “Eccentric Abstraction,” organized by the critic Lucy Lippard.