New York City

Mondrian was 68 when the war chased him across the Atlantic. He left Paris, sat out the Blitz in London, and reached Manhattan in 1940, and the city undid something in his painting. For decades his grids had been black lines on white with a few blocks of primary colour. Here the black is gone. Red, yellow and blue lines weave over and under each other like taped strips, crossing the way the avenues cross, and the picture takes the name of the place that shook him loose, New York City. He loved the traffic and the jazz, and you can feel him counting out a rhythm across the canvas. He died in New York early in 1944, two years after finishing it.