Broadway Boogie Woogie

Piet Mondrian, 1943

So, on his first night in New York, somebody puts on boogie-woogie for Mondrian. He's sixty-eight. The war has pushed him out of Paris, then London, and now he's starting over again. Boogie-woogie is Black American piano music. The left hand hammers out the same bass pattern. The right hand runs loose above it. One holds the floor under you. The other tries to get away. Mondrian had been working on that problem for years. Now it had a beat. A couple of years later, he makes this. A little over four feet square. White ground. Yellow lines, broken up by little blocks of red, blue, gray, and white. And no black. For years, thick black bars had kept Mondrian's colors apart. Here, color has to do the job itself. The grid is still there. It just won't sit still. He finishes it in 1943. He's seventy-one. It's the last painting he completes. But, there's one more going on the easel. He called it: Victory Boogie-Woogie. He keeps changing that one with little strips of colored tape. Move one. Peel another off. Try it somewhere else. When Mondrian dies, the tape is still attached. So, this is the last one he gets all the way into paint. And the same year he finishes it, Peggy Guggenheim puts him on a jury for a show of young American artists. The version that survives goes like this. Some unknown thirty-one-year-old submits a strange painting. Bright colors. A body lying down, maybe. Lines scratched across it like handwriting. Mondrian stands in front of it for a long time. Peggy comes over. "Pretty awful," she says. "That's not painting, is it?" Mondrian keeps looking. "I'm trying to understand what's happening here." Then he tells her: "I think this is the most interesting work I've seen so far in America." Peggy says, you can't compare this with the way you paint. Mondrian answers: "The way I paint and the way I think are two different things." The painting he was trying to understand was by Jackson Pollock.

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