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In the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art which Alfred Barr (the first director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York) organised in 1936, Mondrian stood out as the leading representative of the geometricising trend within abstraction. Barr distinguished between Mondrian's abstraction and the other more biomorphic and organic line of abstraction-represented by Kandinsky and Miró-describing it as "the shape of the square confronts the silhouette of the amoeba."
Mondrian, who was connected with the Dutch Neo plastic movement which was associated with the publication De Stijl, had dedicated his entire oeuvre to the investigation of the balance between orthogonal lines and primary colours. This empassioned search for the visual equivalent of a universal truth made him one of the principal figures within the modern movement. In this process by which pictorial language is reduced to its basic elements and to a simple network of verticals and horizontals, the structure of the grid appeared in his work which, according to Rosalind Krauss, "from then on became the emblem of modern desires in the field of the visual arts."
In the autumn of 1940 after the bombing of London and the German entry into Paris, Mondrian decided to accept the invitation of the American painter Harry Holtzman and moved to New York where he found the support of old friends and new admirers. In New York Mondrian painted a new group of works inspired by New York of which New York City, New York in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is one. Mondrian used to say that these paintings were made in response to the first impression which the city had produced on him from the boat. From the very first moment he felt strongly attracted by the dynamism of the great metropolis, by its grid layout and its high buildings, which he used to say were "the furthest from nature." He was also attracted by the latest developments in rhythm and counter rhythm in jazz, and in the new boogie woogie whose rhythms had already fascinated him in Paris.
This group of New York paintings has been studied not only from the point of view of the effect which the city produced on the artist, but also from the point of view of the introduction of a new technique. The thick black lines which mark out the fields of colour in his earlier works were now seen as too traditional, and Mondrian turned to a new material to create his works: coloured adhesive tape. The fact that the tape could be removed allowed the artist to change its placement on the white canvas until he found the most satisfactory and balanced layout for his composition. The final phase was to replace the strips of coloured tape with painted strips, although this was only achieved with one of the canvases in the series, New York City (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). The other works remained unfinished, with the coloured tape still attached, and still unpainted, expressing what Christopher Green (1995) has called a "suspended irresolution." In general Mondrian kept his paintings in his studio for long periods and made changes to them until he achieved the desired balance of lines and colours. For the artist a finished picture was no more than a stage in a process. As his biographer Michel Seuphor explained (1956), Piet Mondrian "only painted because he thought that painting could improve: each work had to mean an improvement on the previous one."
In 1941 Mondrian himself commented to the gallery owner Sidney Janis that he considered that a painting was more finished when "it had more boogie woogie." In the last work which he ever completed, Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1942 1943 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Mondrian achieved that which he had been pursuing all his life, the expression of pure rhythm in painting.
Paloma Alarcó
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