New York City I

Mondrian spent his final years in New York, having left Europe as the war closed in, out of Paris, then out of London during the bombing, and across the Atlantic in 1940, in his late sixties. The city delighted him: its street grid, its electric energy, the boogie-woogie jazz he loved to dance to. This picture he never finished. Instead of paint, its bands of red, yellow and blue are strips of coloured tape, laid down so he could shift them about and try the design again and again, like rearranging the traffic on a map. He seems to have meant to fix the lines in paint later and never did. For decades the museum hung it one way, until a curator argued in 2022 that Mondrian had it the other way up, and that all this time New York City I had been on the wall upside down.