Broadway Boogie-Woogie

Mondrian had spent decades paring painting down to black lines and blocks of primary colour. Then in 1940 he fled the war in Europe and arrived in New York, and the night he landed friends introduced him to boogie-woogie, a fast, syncopated piano music he fell for completely. He worked on this canvas for about ten months across 1942 and 1943, and you can see the city and the music working on him. He dropped the heavy black lines he had used for years. Instead the grid is built from tiny blinking squares of red, yellow and blue that stutter along each band like traffic along a Manhattan avenue, or notes down a keyboard. It was the last painting he finished before he died in 1944.