Broadway Boogie Woogie
Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) · 1942 to 1943
After thirty years of black lines and primary rectangles, Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940 and fell in love with the city and with jazz. The painting he made in response is a grid of yellow lines, broken into little blocks of red, blue and grey that seem to blink and hop along the tracks like traffic lights or taxis on the avenues. Larger rectangles of colour sit in the spaces between, like city blocks. There is no black anywhere, and the whole surface seems to vibrate.
Stand close and you can see how the painting was built. Mondrian first laid out the composition with strips of coloured adhesive tape, moving them around for weeks, and traces of that process survive under the paint. The blocks are not evenly spaced; they speed up and slow down, in imitation of the syncopated rhythms of boogie woogie piano that his friend Harry Holtzman had played for him on his first night in Manhattan. Notice the tiny grey squares that act like rests in the music, and the way the yellow lines never quite settle into a regular grid.
Mondrian finished the picture in 1943 and it was bought almost immediately, the only painting he sold in America during his lifetime; it entered MoMA the same year as an anonymous gift. He died of pneumonia in February 1944 with a second New York picture, Victory Boogie Woogie, unfinished on the easel. For a painter famous for austerity, this is a joyful farewell, and the best way to see it is to imagine you are looking down on Manhattan at night from a high window.
Did You Know? Mondrian planned the composition with strips of coloured paper tape before painting, and he was a passionate dancer who was banned from one Paris dance hall for his unorthodox steps.
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