Mondrian Boogie Woogie

At MoMA, *Broadway Boogie Woogie* shows Piet Mondrian’s late shift from strict grid to a syncopated pattern of small, bright blocks. Painted after he arrived in New York in 1940, it folds the city’s street plan and the pulse of boogie-woogie music into abstraction. The work has become part of the city’s cultural self-image, a modernist answer to Midtown’s motion and noise. Its restraint is the point: the painting turns urban speed into structure without fully taming it.