Piet Mondrian 'Broadway Boogie-Woogie' Exhibition Poster

This poster carries Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43): the heavy black grid of his earlier work replaced by streams of small coloured blocks, yellow shot through with red, blue and grey, flickering across the canvas like traffic and marquee lights.

For three decades Mondrian had painted the most disciplined pictures in Europe — black lines, white grounds, the three primary colours, nothing diagonal, nothing curved — in pursuit of an absolute balance he called Neo-Plasticism. He was so committed to the principle that he broke with a fellow De Stijl member over the use of a diagonal line. He was not, by reputation, a painter who improvised.

Then in 1940 he fled the war to Manhattan, and the city loosened the grid. He was introduced to boogie-woogie music on his first nights in New York and fell for it, and he set about translating its syncopation into paint. Broadway Boogie-Woogie was the high point of that effort and one of the last works he completed before his death in 1944. The man who had spent his career chasing stillness arrived in New York at sixty-eight and, at the very end, painted movement. It stands among the greatest works of geometric abstraction.

Our poster imagines a 1960s New York gallery exhibition, using the clean typographic conventions of a mid-century American announcement. The layout stays minimal so that the painting’s pulsing grid of colour holds the whole composition.

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