New York City
Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) · 1942
Not currently on display. The Centre Pompidou building is closed for renovation from September 2025 until about 2030, so this work is not on view in Paris; check the museum website for where the collection is being shown.
Lines of pure yellow, red and blue cross a white square like the streets of a city seen from above. There are no black lines at all, which for Mondrian was a revolution. For twenty years his paintings had been grids of black bars with rectangles of primary colour; here the colour has become the grid, and the lines weave over and under each other, yellow passing above red, blue slipping beneath yellow, so that the flat surface seems to pulse and vibrate. It is the only finished painting in a series of four that Mondrian began after he arrived in New York in 1940, fleeing the war in Europe.
He was nearly seventy when he reached Manhattan, and the city thrilled him: the grid of streets, the neon, the jazz clubs, above all the boogie woogie piano music he heard on records and in bars. He wanted his painting to have the same syncopated rhythm. Look at where the lines cross and how the overlapping changes the sense of depth, and count the yellow lines, which dominate like a bright melody over the red and blue. Mondrian worked out the composition with strips of coloured tape stuck to the canvas, moving them for months before he painted the final version.
The painting was bought by the museum in 1984 with the help of the Scaler Foundation and is one of the few late Mondrians in Europe. Its unfinished siblings, still showing their tape, are in other collections and reveal his method. Mondrian died in 1944 with Victory Boogie Woogie unfinished on his easel; New York City is the last complete statement of a life spent reducing painting to lines and colours, and it turns out to be full of joy.
Did You Know? Mondrian loved dancing and was a keen amateur of the Charleston and the boogie woogie, and he said the rhythm of jazz was what his painting was about.
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