Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, 50 x 50 inches, oil on canvas
It is interesting to consider Mondrian's now iconic masterpiece, Broadway Boogie Woogie, as a sort of exquisite synthesis of East and West, embodied in a revolutionary and crystalline understanding of the physicality and plasticity of the painting language. If we accept McLuhan's characterization of Western thought as sequential and rational, and of the Eastern conception of reality as a "total inclusive field of resonance", we can watch Mondrian develop the mechanics of his language as a lifelong sequential process -- slowly and deliberately shaping his idiom in search of an ultimate integration. This process seemed to accelerate in the last few years of his life. In the painting Trafalgar Square and several other works from the late thirties, we see the prediction of Mondrian's final radical shift. He begins to employ small colored rectangles that are not bound by black, and that are placed in rhythmic intervals along a linear path. This is important because for the first time the artist is introducing an element that seems to acknowledge and mimic the kinetic opticality of the little white lights that appear and disappear in the viewer's retina at each point where the black lines cross -- an effect that magically transforms the concrete object into an ineffable experience. I think Mondrian's keen awareness of this effect led him to find a way to employ its rhythmic complexity to achieve his goal -- a total inclusive field of resonance.
Piet Mondrian, Trafalgar Square, 1939-43, 57 x 47 inches, oil on canvas (image from MoMA website)
Of course Mondrian's "image" is inseparable from the physical quality of his surfaces, where each shape has both a discrete presence and an irreducible role in the total configuration.
Broadway Boogie Woogie (detail)
Broadway Boogie Woogie (detail)
Broadway Boogie Woogie (detail)
Broadway Boogie Woogie (detail)
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie with frame at MoMA
