iMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA)Midtown Manhattan
Mondrian Boogie Woogie
The first major survey of Piet Mondrian's final New York years (1940-44), reuniting Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie for the first time in 30 years and tracing boogie woogie's influence on his late compositions.
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Preview: written before the show opened
On 3 October 1940, the 66-year-old Piet Mondrian stepped off the RMS Samaria after a wartime Atlantic crossing, and that night his friend Harry Holtzman played him boogie woogie records. Mondrian's last two paintings came out of that music, and Broadway Boogie Woogie and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie hang together for the first time in 30 years.
The show is 30 artworks from his four New York years, including paintings he brought over from Europe in a crate and reworked to make them, in his words, "more boogie woogie". Around them are archival material, audio in the galleries and a section on Café Society, the integrated nightclub where he heard the music live. You get the soundtrack in the room: Jason Moran recorded an original piece on a Steinway installed in the gallery, heard on digital playback.
It's on Floor 3 (3 South), with member previews 18 to 20 March and live music programmed alongside. After New York it moves to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Look for
Victory Boogie Woogie
Mondrian's unfinished last canvas, lent from The Hague, still covered in the pieces of coloured paper and tape he kept moving around until his death in 1944.
Broadway Boogie Woogie
MoMA's own 50-inch-square canvas, where the black grid is gone and small blocks of primary colour run in patterns like a syncopated street map.
The crate paintings
Works Mondrian carried from Europe and reworked in New York, so you can look for what changed when he made them "more boogie woogie".
The Steinway in the gallery
A piano installed among the works, on which Jason Moran recorded an original composition for the show that plays back digitally.
The Café Society section
A section on New York's first integrated nightclub, where pianists Albert Ammons, Meade "Lux" Lewis and Pete Johnson were in residence and Mondrian was a regular.
Good for
- First-Timers
- Nerding Out
- Out-Of-Town Guests
Also at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
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Image credits
6
- Mondrian Boogie WoogieCourtesy of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
- Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450-1500The Frick Collection
- Splendido, As Seen by Chris RhodesCourtesy of Aperture
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)hibino via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- The Frick CollectionJim.henderson / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- The Morgan Library & MuseumMike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0