New York City, 1942–43.
This animation reimagines Piet Mondrian’s final masterpiece. Painted shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, Broadway Boogie Woogie marked a radical departure from his earlier black-grid compositions.
Fascinated by the city's architectural grid and the syncopated rhythms of jazz and boogie-woogie music, Mondrian replaced solid black lines with vibrant, shimmering bands of color. The staccato rhythm of the yellow lines, interspersed with red, blue, and grey, mimics the frantic energy of New York traffic and the pulse of the music he loved.
This digital interpretation amplifies that energy, turning the static canvas into a living, breathing metropolis where the infrastructure itself is composed of pure, rhythmic motion. The cars blink and shift, a nod to the neon lights and the ceaseless movement of the modern age.
It stands not just as a painting, but as a map of modernism—a joyful, chaotic, yet perfectly ordered celebration of life in the big city.