ITP 55: Broadway Boogie-Woogie, by Piet Mondrian
On this date three hundred and seventy five years ago a Dutch official named Pieter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Native Americans for sixty guilders’-worth of knives, cloth and beads. Today’s picture is Mondrian’s celebrated Broadway Boogie-Woogie: another case of a Dutchman called Pieter taking possession of Manhattan, albeit this time in the realm of art.
Mondrian arrived in New York as a refugee from war in 1940. He had fled his longtime home of Paris just two years earlier, when the threat of German invasion persuaded him to move to London. After a bomb narrowly missed his peaceful whitewashed studio in Hampstead he had resolved to leave Europe altogether. The form he was required to fill out for Immigration on entering the United States still survives, complete with an attached photograph of the bespectacled painter looking understandably tense. Under “Visible Distinctive Marks” he wrote “slightly bald”; under “Marital Status”, “not married”. Mondrian was in his late sixties, his health was poor and he sensed that little time was left to him. A lifelong bachelor, who pursued his artistic goals with all the dedication of an ascetic, he believed that the New World would provide him with the stimulus for new paintings. His optimism proved to be well founded.
Mondrian’s Manhattan address was 353 East 56th Street, central enough for him to feel he was at the very hub of the world’s liveliest city. He had come to believe that it was the sacrosanct task of the artist both to embrace and to shape all that was truly modern in the modern world; to pursue the ideal of progress with utter singlemindedness and, in doing so, to rid himself utterly of the residue of the past. Manhattan was his utopia: a place, as he said, where “We can enjoy modern construction, marvels of science, technique of all kinds, as well as modern art. We can enjoy real jazz and its dance; we see the electric lights of luxury and utility; the window displays. Even the thought of all this is gratifying. Then we feel the great difference between modern times and the past.”
The artist’s response to New York was little short of ecstatic, as the buzzing, flickering grid of Broadway Boogie-Woogie suggests. The painting is a pulsating diagram of energies, a distillation of life in Manhattan that evokes a multitude of different experiences and perspectives of the city: lights seen in skyscrapers at night; the metronomic rise and fall of elevators; yellow cabs, cars and trucks crossing busy intersections in droves; blinking neon signage; the right-angled grid pattern of the new York street plan. All this is caught in a single image which moves, as if in defiance of the presumed stasis of painting, to the insistent, syncopated rhythms of jazz.
Mondrian had always enjoyed dance music, pre-eminently tango, but it was only on his arrival in New York that he felt he had discovered a form of it in tune with his own singular ambitions as an artist. He would dance in jazz clubs until the small hours (somewhat stiffly and angularly, observers noted), only sitting down when, as he put it, “I hear a melody”. The unceasing movement of jazz rhythm had come, for him, to represent the ceaselessly moving truth of existence; whereas the static line of a melody seemed like a kind of death or ending, a futile attempt to stem the rushing tides of existence. The little blocks of colour flowing through the capillary network of lines that make up Broadway Boogie-Woogie suggest a form of musical notation. Like eighth or sixteenth notes, they seem to snap out a sharp, bouncing staccato rhythm. Mondrian encouraged such analogies himself, pronouncing on the relationship between his own painting and jazz in characteristically gnomic fashion: “True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm.”
Mondrian had a profound belief in progress, the key to which he believed lay in man’s innate dissatisfaction with the merely “natural” world. He disliked classical representational art, for example, because he felt it simply reproduced what that world looked like, rather than seeking to go beyond it to a higher truth. For Mondrian, the “essence” of life was to be found in the perception of the fundamental structures that govern it. The pattern of his work throughout his life had, accordingly, been one of ever-increasing abstraction. He had begun his career as a painter of natural forms – trees, or the ocean, seen from the shores of his native Holland – but had gradually transformed such motifs into what he believed was a kind of universal grammar of form and colour. By the late 1930s, immediately preceding his departure for New York, Mondrian’s work had reached a pitch of simplicity, austerity and spareness, while his spiritual aspirations for it – reflecting, perhaps, his upbringing as the son of stern Dutch Calvinists – had become almost limitless. His pictures consisted of carefully balanced and counterpointed grids and rectangles of unmodulated primary colours, plus white, each enclosed by a bounding black line. The whole world had been simplified to its most basic palette and reduced to the single principle of the horizontal versus the vertical.
With a degree of idealism almost unimaginable on the part of any artist today, Mondrian saw such pictures as blueprints – admittedly somewhat opaque – for all of the structures of man, whether they be political, urban or moral. One day, he believed, everything in the world would be conceived and shaped with the same care and attention to higher realities, the same due attention to balance, measure and construction that he had demonstrated in his pictures. On that day, people such as he would have served their purpose. “Growing humanity must… Realize Truth and Beauty. Then life becomes itself Beauty and Truth. Then life itself is Art and Religion. Then Art and Religion are Superfluous.” Mondrian’s sense of the importance of his mission was enhanced by the knowledge that Europe was slipping inexorably into war at the time; yet his bright modernist hopes for the future remained, remarkably, undimmed. Almost as soon as he arrived in America he wrote encouragingly to friends in London to say that “fortunately we know that the way of the world is good in the end: greater perfection.”
New York cheered Mondrian because it seemed like the beginning of the fulfilment of his utopian ideas: the first draft, so to speak, of an ideal city that might almost have been modelled on his love for grid-form composition, and that seemed to give concrete embodiment to the simple beauty of opposing verticals and horizontals to which he had consecrated so much of his art. He was so excited by the city, in fact, that he revised his art to account for what he felt the place had taught him. His previous work had been too static, he felt. New York had showed him that the essence of modern life should not be measure and stasis but perpetual, invigorating motion. So it was that he fractured the bounding black lines of his previous works into these filigrees of multi-coloured mosaic – a device which both acknowledges New York as the new imperium, Rome and Byzantium rolled into one, but one which vitally destabilises the very nature of Mondrian’s art and announces his new ambition for it, which was “to establish life in its unchanging aspect: as pure vitality.”
Mondrian also criticised Manhattan, on occasion. “How beautiful!” he allegedly said of Times Square, “if only I couldn’t read English.” The city was a beautiful thing, in other words, but also one besmirched and befouled by commerce and its multitude of yabbering, banal messages. In painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Mondrian was testifying to his love of the place but also characteristically attempting to perfect it – suggesting how absolutely beautiful the city would be if metamorphosed into a strange, spectral abstraction of itself, where none of the taxis have numberplates, none of the buildings have corporate names, and where the neon signs do not flash with crass commercial intent but flicker, instead, with the radiance of angels. Barely a year after finishing the painting, Mondrian lay dying of pneumonia in New York’s Murray Hill Hospital. Broadway Boogie-Woogie was, in effect, his final statement: the last exhalation of a splendid and perhaps slightly mad optimism.
Date: 06-05-2001
Owning Institution: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
20th Century
On this date three hundred and seventy five years ago a Dutch official named Pieter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Native Americans for sixty guilders’-worth of knives, cloth and beads. Today’s picture is Mondrian’s celebrated Broadway Boogie-Woogie: another case of a Dutchman called Pieter taking possession of Manhattan, albeit this time in the realm of art.Mondrian arrived in New York as a refugee from war in 1940. He had fled his longtime home of Paris just two years earlier, when the threat of German invasion persuaded him to move to London. After a bomb narrowly missed his peaceful whitewashed studio in Hampstead he had resolved to leave Europe altogether. The form he was required to fill out for Immigration on entering the United States still survives, complete with an attached photograph of the bespectacled painter looking understandably tense. Under “Visible Distinctive Marks” he wrote “slightly bald”; under “Marital Status”, “not married”. Mondrian was in his late sixties, his health was poor and he sensed that little time was left to him. A lifelong bachelor, who pursued his artistic goals with all the dedication of an ascetic, he believed that the New World would provide him with the stimulus for new paintings. His optimism proved to be well founded.
Mondrian’s Manhattan address was 353 East 56th Street, central enough for him to feel he was at the very hub of the world’s liveliest city. He had come to believe that it was the sacrosanct task of the artist both to embrace and to shape all that was truly modern in the modern world; to pursue the ideal of progress with utter singlemindedness and, in doing so, to rid himself utterly of the residue of the past. Manhattan was his utopia: a place, as he said, where “We can enjoy modern construction, marvels of science, technique of all kinds, as well as modern art. We can enjoy real jazz and its dance; we see the electric lights of luxury and utility; the window displays. Even the thought of all this is gratifying. Then we feel the great difference between modern times and the past.”
The artist’s response to New York was little short of ecstatic, as the buzzing, flickering grid of Broadway Boogie-Woogie suggests. The painting is a pulsating diagram of energies, a distillation of life in Manhattan that evokes a multitude of different experiences and perspectives of the city: lights seen in skyscrapers at night; the metronomic rise and fall of elevators; yellow cabs, cars and trucks crossing busy intersections in droves; blinking neon signage; the right-angled grid pattern of the new York street plan. All this is caught in a single image which moves, as if in defiance of the presumed stasis of painting, to the insistent, syncopated rhythms of jazz.
Mondrian had always enjoyed dance music, pre-eminently tango, but it was only on his arrival in New York that he felt he had discovered a form of it in tune with his own singular ambitions as an artist. He would dance in jazz clubs until the small hours (somewhat stiffly and angularly, observers noted), only sitting down when, as he put it, “I hear a melody”. The unceasing movement of jazz rhythm had come, for him, to represent the ceaselessly moving truth of existence; whereas the static line of a melody seemed like a kind of death or ending, a futile attempt to stem the rushing tides of existence. The little blocks of colour flowing through the capillary network of lines that make up Broadway Boogie-Woogie suggest a form of musical notation. Like eighth or sixteenth notes, they seem to snap out a sharp, bouncing staccato rhythm. Mondrian encouraged such analogies himself, pronouncing on the relationship between his own painting and jazz in characteristically gnomic fashion: “True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm.”
Mondrian had a profound belief in progress, the key to which he believed lay in man’s innate dissatisfaction with the merely “natural” world. He disliked classical representational art, for example, because he felt it simply reproduced what that world looked like, rather than seeking to go beyond it to a higher truth. For Mondrian, the “essence” of life was to be found in the perception of the fundamental structures that govern it. The pattern of his work throughout his life had, accordingly, been one of ever-increasing abstraction. He had begun his career as a painter of natural forms – trees, or the ocean, seen from the shores of his native Holland – but had gradually transformed such motifs into what he believed was a kind of universal grammar of form and colour. By the late 1930s, immediately preceding his departure for New York, Mondrian’s work had reached a pitch of simplicity, austerity and spareness, while his spiritual aspirations for it – reflecting, perhaps, his upbringing as the son of stern Dutch Calvinists – had become almost limitless. His pictures consisted of carefully balanced and counterpointed grids and rectangles of unmodulated primary colours, plus white, each enclosed by a bounding black line. The whole world had been simplified to its most basic palette and reduced to the single principle of the horizontal versus the vertical.
With a degree of idealism almost unimaginable on the part of any artist today, Mondrian saw such pictures as blueprints – admittedly somewhat opaque – for all of the structures of man, whether they be political, urban or moral. One day, he believed, everything in the world would be conceived and shaped with the same care and attention to higher realities, the same due attention to balance, measure and construction that he had demonstrated in his pictures. On that day, people such as he would have served their purpose. “Growing humanity must… Realize Truth and Beauty. Then life becomes itself Beauty and Truth. Then life itself is Art and Religion. Then Art and Religion are Superfluous.” Mondrian’s sense of the importance of his mission was enhanced by the knowledge that Europe was slipping inexorably into war at the time; yet his bright modernist hopes for the future remained, remarkably, undimmed. Almost as soon as he arrived in America he wrote encouragingly to friends in London to say that “fortunately we know that the way of the world is good in the end: greater perfection.”
New York cheered Mondrian because it seemed like the beginning of the fulfilment of his utopian ideas: the first draft, so to speak, of an ideal city that might almost have been modelled on his love for grid-form composition, and that seemed to give concrete embodiment to the simple beauty of opposing verticals and horizontals to which he had consecrated so much of his art. He was so excited by the city, in fact, that he revised his art to account for what he felt the place had taught him. His previous work had been too static, he felt. New York had showed him that the essence of modern life should not be measure and stasis but perpetual, invigorating motion. So it was that he fractured the bounding black lines of his previous works into these filigrees of multi-coloured mosaic – a device which both acknowledges New York as the new imperium, Rome and Byzantium rolled into one, but one which vitally destabilises the very nature of Mondrian’s art and announces his new ambition for it, which was “to establish life in its unchanging aspect: as pure vitality.”
Mondrian also criticised Manhattan, on occasion. “How beautiful!” he allegedly said of Times Square, “if only I couldn’t read English.” The city was a beautiful thing, in other words, but also one besmirched and befouled by commerce and its multitude of yabbering, banal messages. In painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Mondrian was testifying to his love of the place but also characteristically attempting to perfect it – suggesting how absolutely beautiful the city would be if metamorphosed into a strange, spectral abstraction of itself, where none of the taxis have numberplates, none of the buildings have corporate names, and where the neon signs do not flash with crass commercial intent but flicker, instead, with the radiance of angels. Barely a year after finishing the painting, Mondrian lay dying of pneumonia in New York’s Murray Hill Hospital. Broadway Boogie-Woogie was, in effect, his final statement: the last exhalation of a splendid and perhaps slightly mad optimism.
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