Piet Mondrian, known as “the father of geometric abstraction,” was a Dutch painter who was a key figure during the 20th century’s revolution in Modern Art. Mondrian fled war-torn Europe to New York where he was inspired by the life of the city and jazz, specifically the Boogie Woogie. In Piet Mondrian’s pieces, he only uses primary colors and the grayscale along with simple shapes like lines and squares. This is a type of art known as minimalism where the unnecessary is extracted from the painting so that it is left to its purest or most perfect state. Minimalism was a reaction to the industrialization and materialism that pervaded the Western World before World War II. Piet Mondrian participated in a specific Minimalism movement known as De Stijl or Dutch for “The Style”.
In Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, the traditional perception of a busy city has been shredded down to the most basic colors, blue red and yellow along with black and grays. The yellow square in the painting depicts the taxicabs of the city. The contrast of the yellow and gray is the same therefore your eyes cannot focus on the two colors at once. This gives the painting an overall “jittery motion” making the painting come alive. Additionally, the painting is not only very linear but more importantly, the “streets” are arranged either perpendicular or parallel to each other. Mondrian’s impact on the Minimalism movement may have influenced writers such as Antoine de Saint- Exupery who coined the idea that perfection is achieved when nothing bad can be taken away. After almost 70 years of the movement, modern day society continues to implement the idea that perfection is found in simplicity. Evidence of this can be found in furniture such as Bauhaus and Ikea, companies that use simple shapes and materials to change the concept of luxury from lavish to simple(PIet Mondrian Archive).
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