Next spring, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will stage a major exhibition of Piet Mondrian’s work, focusing on the final years of his career and the profound influence that boogie-woogie music had on his late works.
Opening March 21st, 2027 and running through July 31st, “Mondrian Boogie Woogie” will bring together more than 30 artworks, along with archival materials and immersive audio installations exploring the Dutch artist’s four years in New York between 1940 and 1944. The exhibition will significantly reunite Mondrian’s final two paintings, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) and Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44), which will be shown together for the first time in more than three decades.
The exhibition traces a pivotal chapter in Mondrian’s career. Having fled Europe during World War II, the 66-year-old artist arrived in New York on October 3, 1940. In this new city, Mondrian became captivated by boogie-woogie music, a piano-heavy genre of blues popular in New York. Originating with Black musicians in the American South as early as the 1870s, boogie-woogie music flourished in urban centers in the decades that followed.
Mondrian regularly attended performances at Café Society, New York’s first racially integrated nightclub, where leading pianists of the genre such as Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Pete Johnson were in residence.
The improvisational quality of the music significantly influenced Mondrian’s artistic practice. The artist, who in 1917 cofounded the De Stijl art movement in Holland, began reworking paintings he had completed in Europe, using colored tape and loosening the rigid grid structures that had defined his earlier abstractions. A new sense of rhythm and movement entered Mondrian’s practice, culminating in Broadway Boogie Woogie and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie, both now considered among the most celebrated paintings of his career.
“Mondrian Boogie Woogie” will also explore Mondrian’s experience as a wartime refugee along with the exodus of Black communities from the American South to Northern cities during the Great Migration in the U.S. from 1910 to 1970.
Other exhibition highlights will include a section devoted to Café Society and a series of musical components developed by contemporary composer and pianist Jason Moran and scholar Brent Hayes Edwards especially for the exhibition. Following its presentation at MoMA, “Mondrian Boogie Woogie” will travel to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, where it will open in September 2027.
