New York City

Piet Mondrian

Oil on canvas

Centre Pompidou

New York City is a completed oil-on-canvas painting executed by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) in 1942, following his arrival in New York in 1940 as a wartime émigré. The composition is structured from an interwoven grid of fifteen yellow lines, four blue lines, and four red lines—an abandonment of the black lines and contained color planes that had defined his earlier Neo-Plasticist work—generating a dense, luminous optical dynamism understood to evoke the orthogonal street grid and electric energy of Manhattan. Part of a series of four closely related works produced between 1941 and 1942, it stands as the only version in the series considered fully complete, with the others remaining in various unfinished states incorporating colored paper tape. Held in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris since 1984, the painting is widely recognized as a pivotal transition within Mondrian's late career, anticipating the even greater rhythmic complexity of his final completed work, Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43, MoMA).