Piet Mondrian was an early 20th Century modern artist who focused his work towards pure abstraction – distilling his perceptions down to the most basic shapes, colors and organization. His work demands a form of ‘visual discipline’ to appreciate, as there is no correspondence with known natural shapes. He forces the viewer to contend with a minimal set of pure colors and organization. Note the variety and interest in this context is around shapes (big and small), the placement of borders, and the implied motion of the color regions. None of the regions in this picture are shown completely. They all ‘move off’ to areas outside the picture.
In this way Mondrian achieved the ultimate in visual abstraction, in a highly controlled way. He didn’t consider them ‘paintings’ but ‘discoveries’, another attribute of modernism. The METHOD of expression becomes the focus,not the SUBJECT. The artist is largely, if not totally, drawing from internal visual, organizational and spiritual resources.
Here is an example of one of these severe abstractions, “Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow” (1930)
When Mondrian moved to America from Europe in 1940, he was moved by the complexity and richness of the New York City streets and skyline. The music, to him, represented this same busy, organized but often chaotic environment. Jazz in particular had this rhythmic drive and improvisaton within set structures (like the blues form). Mondrian called it the “destruction of natural appearance; and construction through continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm”. Clearly, New York had qualities Mondrian felt he could express using his formal vocabulary. But there was something more.
Mondrian was a mature artist at the end of his career. The two boogie woogie paintings were the last he would compose: “Broadway Boogie Woogie, and the last, “Victory Boogie Woogie” left incomplete on his stand at his passing.
The streets, sounds and organization of New York were new to him, and allowed him to expand his existing vocabulary in two important ways:
- The rigid organization of shapes and colors were now organized into a recognizable set of structures: streets, buildings and objects (people and/or vehicles, subways)
- A sense of motion, of relationship – a story, if you will (heaven forbid, Piet!) emerges. Broadway Boogie Woogie tells the story of the pounding, busy regular rhythm of the big city.
Boogie Woogie was a form of dance music based on the blues, that had a period of intense popularity during the late 20’s and 30’s. It featured a repetitive bass figure that anchored the ‘groove’, while the right hand also played repetitive but more freely improvised ‘licks’ across the top. As a style this was fairly simple, but it made for very catchy dance music. Ultimately boogie woogie drifted away from popular attention as it could not escape it’s own forced limitations of the same bass patterns and simple blues licks on top.
A good musical example of this is Count Basie’s “Boogie Woogie”, from 1941 (around the time this was painted). You can hear the repeating bass line, the regularly spaced licks across the top from Basie’s piano, the horn backgrounds, even the vocal by Jimmy Rushing is very cadenced and controlled. [Play 30 seconds from the original recording:] https://youtu.be/xPKQXXHOPU0?si=iDMhBDMijuY08M7P
But for Mondrian this synched his artistic style perfectly to his approach. Broadway Boogie Woogie” is just that: A pre-set grid of ‘streets’ and ‘avenues’, running in various combinations across the work, with varied groupings of objects on the streets (the top end “licks”, the melodies in motion). The regular, rigid construction of elements (this whole painting is still just a small, set group of colors and shapes) fits the boogie woogie style exactly.
In this audio-visual improvisation based on the song and the picture I marry the energies we perceive in the painting with the boogie woogie style. The ‘cars’ on the streets (with a few speeding subways) are animated to bring the streets to life, and represent the many varied combinations you might perceive as your view shifts across the urban landscape.
https://youtu.be/76dJIRh4BU0?si=Dnm2faMlzvRjwOVC
With Broadway Boogie Woogie, Mondrian achieved a new, audio/visual level of modernism: bringing together his highly structured, abstract visual approach with a fitting ‘sound track’, one he could perhaps hear out his window (or on the radio) while he painted. Modern music meets modern art!
Music: John Chmaj, piano
Visualization/animation: Frank Coleman, 21st Century art