Victory Boogie Woogie

Piet Mondrian

Oil, paper, charcoal, pencil, adhesive tape, and cellophane on canvas

Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Victory Boogie Woogie is the final, unfinished work of Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian, left incomplete at his death in New York on February 1, 1944. Executed on a diamond-oriented (lozenge) canvas, it pushes beyond his preceding Broadway Boogie Woogie by nearly eliminating continuous lines in favor of an intricate mosaic of small colored planes — blocks of yellow, red, blue, white, and gray — many of which were applied using pieces of colored tape and cellophane rather than paint alone. Conceived in anticipation of Allied victory in World War II, the work represents the culmination of Mondrian's New York period and his lifelong pursuit of dynamic equilibrium through pure abstraction and Neo-Plasticism. Since 1998 it has been held in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague, where it stands as one of the most significant works in the history of twentieth-century abstract art.