MoMA announces "Mondrian Boogie Woogie", running from 21 March to 31 July 2027 and the first survey of Piet Mondrian's New York works

A Dutchman, one of the pioneers of abstraction and co-founder of De Stijl, the international association for non-representational art, Mondrian fled the war and reached New York in 1940, where he fell in love with the city and with boogie-woogie and, by his own account, began to "add a little boogie-woogie" to his paintings: he removed the black grid and broke the lines into pulsating little coloured squares, resembling a map of the streets.

The exhibition will bring together his last two works, Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1942-43 from the MoMA collection and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie of 1942-44 from the Kunstmuseum in The Hague, for the first time in more than thirty years. By design, the exhibition is meant to join two migrations: that of Mondrian himself and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, which brought boogie-woogie to the cities