The Museum of Modern Art has announced a forthcoming exhibition dedicated to Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian’s years in New York—in particular, the influence of the city’s boogie-woogie music scene on his art. The exhibition will bring together 30 of Mondrian’s paintings either made or completed between his move to New York in 1940 and his death in 1944.
Known as a pioneer of 20th-century abstraction, Mondrian began as a figurative painter before co-founding the De Stijl art movement—an international collective dedicated to non-representational art—in 1917. After moving to Paris in 1919, he continued to develop his theories on abstract art, eventually settling on the format for which he is best known: rectangular planes of primary colors divided by a grid of strong black lines.
In 1938, Mondrian fled Europe, first moving to London and then, in 1940, to New York City. Long a lover of jazz, Mondrian became obsessed with the genre upon his arrival there, as well as with boogie-woogie, a style of blues undergoing a resurgence in the 1940s.
New York, with its bustling life and vibrant music scene, precipitated a new phase in Mondrian’s work—dispensing with the black grid, he began creating paintings made up of smaller blocks of primary colors arranged in patterns resembling syncopated street maps. Two such works, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) in MoMA’s collection, and Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44), usually on view at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, will anchor the exhibition, which in addition to tracing Mondrian’s final years, will present a parallel history of boogie-woogie from its late 19th-century roots in the American South to its migration north following World War I.
“These two fascinating journeys—Mondrian’s and boogie-woogie’s—are stories of migration, diaspora, encounter, and reimagination, and both are critical to our understanding of modernism in America,” said MoMA’s director of research programs, Leah Dickerman, a co-curator of the show. “We are delighted to partner with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag on reuniting two of Mondrian’s most compelling and beloved works here in the city that inspired them.”
“Mondrian Boogie Woogie,” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from March 21 through July 31, 2027
