Alexander Calder: Ballet without dancers

With Alexander Calder, there are two important ideas to ponder. Firstly, the mind should be able to experience art freely. Secondly, the American artist’s evocative definition of his 1968 Work in Progress as a ‘ballet without dancers’. These two ideas have a simple, yet revealing, backstory.

Calder was a close friend of the French artist André Masson – who lived near the former’s peaceful home/studio Roxbury in Connecticut’s Litchfield County (where Marilyn Monroe, Dustin Hoffman and Arthur Miller once lived). The two artist-friends raised their children and often holidayed together. Masson had suffered a horrendous battle wound in WWI when a bullet passed right through his body longitudinally. His intensive medical treatment necessitated long-term care at Army-acquisitioned beach resorts in France. There, he noticed that ships’ ropes thrown onto jetties possessed an unexpected elegance and calligraphic ‘looseness’ – they ‘sat’ well, showed no tension and seemed sufficient unto themselves. They possessed natural repose – no knots, no kinks – and they had an elegant demeanour. Their easy lines ‘spoke’ of hidden order. The ropes had no ‘hang-ups’.

These incidental happenstance thoughts never left Masson, and his paintings certainly benefitted thereafter. Similar thoughts occurred to the Swiss artist Paul Klee (much admired by Calder) whose pithy phrase ‘a line is a dot taken for a walk’ was eventually uttered by almost every contemporary artist in Europe from the late 1920s onwards.

The overall idea was to draw as a seismograph graphs: receptively, responsively, automatically. It is generally agreed that automatism, as it came to be called, was one of the twentieth century’s most galvanising aesthetic concepts. Abstract Expressionism, specifically, would have been inconceivable without it.

Automatism owes its ideational origin to Sigmund Freud’s uses of free association, some twenty-years earlier, whereby thoughts that came automatically were given automatic voice; a freed voice guided by the contents of a freed mind. Significantly, in the art world, the abiding conviction was, in line with our first two observations, that free thought created free art. Calder, too, was more than familiar with this radical idea. For Calder, as well as others, wonder was freely offered up by epiphanies hidden within the overlooked ephemera of everyday life.

Calder more than likely inspired these far-reaching ideas in conversations not only with Masson but also with the Surrealist André Breton and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, with the latter writing an influential essay on Calder’s sculptures (‘Existentialist on Mobilist’, 1946), as well as other artist-friends: Joan Miró, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy and Stanley Hayter, all of whom tended to take a line for a walk. All this led to the natural birth of an art of ‘artlessness’ – an art that created an output grown from germinative thought or impromptu whims, and even from unpredictable insights. Art was conceived as being fuelled not by the eye, but by the mind – selfgenerated like free association. Art was now an idea that grew.

What then were these ‘ideas’? Calder’s own words outline the answer:

‘Out of different masses, light, heavy, middling – indicated by variations of size or colour–directional line–vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc. … these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many.’ ¹Calder, Alexander. «Comment peut-on réaliser l’art?» Abstraction-Création: Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932, p. 6.

The crucial word here is the geometric term ‘vector’ that refers to an imagined line that conveys, defines or maps direction, space and size. For Calder, a vector was an energetic connection between forms which traced out relationships between sculptural components. In Calder’s schema, sculpture was an abstracted play of relational forms. It was a personalised cluster of this ‘goes’, or does not ‘go’, with that in a spatially intertwined dance of shapes, sizes, weights, connections and positions – all of it guided by the eye, then mapped out by creative configuration in the mind.

These approaches suddenly arose after a singular event in 1930: Calder’s only visit to Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio, where he was “shocked” by the all-encompassing environment. As the sculptor wrote:

‘This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had heard the word “modern” before, I did not consciously know or feel the term “abstract.” So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract’ ²Calder, Alexander. Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 113

Thereafter, Calder adopted a new mode and eventually embarked on his abstract configurations. They were characterised by a light touch, breezy openness, and a seemingly ‘natural’ movement – Marcel Duchamp called them ‘Mobiles’ for Calder’s kinetic objects. They were elegant, they were poised, and they moved. The ‘Mobile’ and later ‘Stabile’ phases often coalesced, especially in domestic sculptures that were free-standing creations with mobile attachments or features, all of them dispensing with plinths to avoid any associations with statues or trophies – the bane of modern sculptors.

The NGV’s Petit Château fort (Small fortified castle), 1970, is one of the most elegant of these abstract sculptures. It is free-standing and composed of two elements: the lower of which is a stable arrangement of flat planar shapes that contrast with the linear mobility of a series of suspended wires in the sculpture’s upper section. This arrangement of counterpoised shapes was not suggested by a physical form like a praying mantis – as though he had extricated the sculpture’s shapes by abstracting them from the living form, not unlike Mondrian’s procedure in his early abstract paintings. The Surrealists much entertained the psycho-sexual implication of the mantis as promulgated by Roger Caillois (1934) and employed it as an analogous model of the femme fatale and, by extension, all human relations (as fully analysed by William Pressley in 1973). There is none of this in Petit Château fort (Small fortified castle).

For Calder, sculpture was all about experience in real time and a type of extractive distillation. The result is that of a tremulously posed and active arrangement of shapes, almost Bonsai-like in their pendulous visual balance, together with a finetuning of volumetric relationships between three-dimensional elements – all of them conceived of the mind rather than as registered by the eye. In short, a ‘ballet without dancers’ – as choreographed, of course, by Alexander Calder.

Dr. Ken Wach is an Associate Professor and former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts at The University of Melbourne, where he taught art history for thirty-five years.

The NGV warmly thanks Marc Besen AC and Eva Besen AO for gifting this work to the NGV Collection.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.

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