Broadway Boogie Woogie 1943

Piet Mondrian made this painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie" at the end of his life, using oil paint and tape on canvas. Look at the yellow lines cutting across the surface, they throb and pulse! I can feel him searching, simplifying. How can painting reflect the speed and rhythm of New York, where he ended up? It's a wild, syncopated grid. He’s got the blues here, red too, and I feel him thinking about a new kind of space, where color stops being about objects and starts being about pure feeling. He loved jazz, and I imagine he wanted painting to swing like that. What would it be like to have a feeling, then just place it right there, that yellow square, that blue one. It's like he is trying to find the simplest, most electric shapes he can. Mondrian’s paintings talk to mine, to yours, to everyone who has ever put color to canvas. He shows us that painting is a language, always changing and always up for grabs.