BROADWAY BOOGIE WOOGIE
PIET MONDRIAN, 1943
Okay, look at this. Before any paint, he built the whole thing out of tape. Little strips of colored tape, stuck down, stepped back from, peeled up, moved an inch, stuck down again. For months. Chasing the right beat. Then slowly, he pinned parts of it down in paint. This is Mondrian. The grid guy. Black lines, three colors, the strictest paintings in modern art. Decades of right angles, limits, discipline. And then, this. Look at it move. Yellow, red, blue, little blocks running up and down the lines like traffic. Like lights blinking on and off. The black lines are gone. The color won't sit still. Your eye tries to land somewhere, and the painting goes, nope, keep moving. Here's what happened. 1940, the war chases him all the way to New York. He's almost seventy. And almost right away, he's out at the jazz clubs. Boogie-woogie. That fast, rolling piano. And something cracks open in him. He takes the strictest art in the world and finds a way to let it swing, without letting it fall apart. He loved to dance, by the way. Late in life. Apparently, not very well. Didn't care. Which somehow makes you love him more. He died not long after this, with the next canvas still on the easel. Tape still loose on it. Never pinned down. So this isn't a man arriving at some final, perfect stillness. It's a guy in his seventies who spent his whole life building a cage, and right at the end, figured out how to dance in it.