Broadway Boogie-Woogie

Piet Mondrian

Oil on canvas

Museum of Modern Art

Broadway Boogie-Woogie is an oil on canvas painting completed by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian between 1942 and 1943, after he relocated to New York City following the outbreak of World War II. The work features a luminous white ground traversed by a network of yellow lines punctuated by small squares of red, blue, and gray — a vivid departure from the rigid black grids that had defined his earlier Neo-Plasticist canvases. The composition evokes the city grid of Manhattan, the energy of its street life, and the syncopated rhythms of boogie-woogie music, which Mondrian had come to love during his years in New York. Widely regarded as the culminating achievement of his career and his last completed painting, it stands as one of the most celebrated works in 20th-century abstract art.