The art historian George Heard Hamilton once observed that Alexander Calder was ‘the first American of the twentieth century to win and hold a European reputation.’ This work, an untitled Surrealist abstract composition of 1932, was one such work which helped Calder forge that reputation. It was made during an extended stay in Paris beginning shortly after his marriage to Louisa James in January 1931 and which lasted until July 1933. The discrete, rounded shapes of saturated blue and red in this work are analogous to the brilliant shards of metal in the artist’s contemporaneous mobiles. This dashing use of primary colours was inspired by the impresario of Parisian modernism, Piet Mondrian, whose studio Calder visited in spring 1930. Calder later described this visit as ‘the necessary shock’. After falling in amongst Mondrian’s other admirers, he joined Abstraction-Création in 1931 where he started making his famous wire mobiles. Less widely known, but still of moment among the swirling currents of Parisian artistic invention, Calder also made a small number of these large-scale works on paper: abstract drawings and gouaches which combine snaking lines of ‘cable’ and circular eddies of continuous lines, so densely applied in certain places that a haze of black ink obscures the round-and-round motion of his pen. In autumn 1968, Calder’s New York dealer held an exhibition of his work that courted the period’s feverish interest in space travel. Space: Drawings 1930-1932; Gouaches 1967-1968 followed on from an exhibition the previous year where another group of ‘early work rediscovered’ had been displayed. These exhibitions included works on paper similar to this work, such as Serpentine (1932, Private Collection) (fig. 1). Despite being nearly forty years old at the time, these products of Parisian abstraction by Calder found a profound contemporary resonance in 1960s New York, with their inscrutable planet-like masses and arcing tubes suggestive of nebulae. This work was first owned by the Swedish artist Eric Grate, who was also based in Paris for some of the 1930s and worked in a similar ‘post-Cubist’ manner to Calder. Some years later in 1950, Grate wrote an introduction to an exhibition of Calder’s ‘mobiles and stabiles’ at Galerie Blanche, Stockholm, organised by Calder’s Paris dealer Galerie Maeght.