Victory Boogie Woogie

Mondrian began this in New York, where he had fled the war, and he meant it as a picture of victory before that victory had come. He gave up smooth painted lines for it and built the surface instead out of tiny squares of coloured tape and cut cellophane, moving them around endlessly. The old white background is gone, crowded out by blocks of red, blue and yellow that jump across the diamond-shaped canvas like the boogie-woogie jazz he loved to dance to. He was still shifting pieces of tape three days before he died in February 1944, so the picture was never finished. What hangs in The Hague is exactly where his hand stopped.