The historical address was 15 East 59th Street, New York. The map marker indicates the approximate location of Mondrian's studio.
Piet Mondrian occupied the studio at 15 East 59th Street for just four months, from October 1943 until his death on 1 February 1944. He worked on two projects here: the painting Victory Boogie Woogie, which kept him constantly busy, and the decoration of the studio itself, using pieces of coloured cardboard that he hung on the wall in ever-changing arrangements.
After Mondrian's death, his friend and sole heir, Harry Holtzman, carefully documented the state of the studio with Fritz Glarner. Thanks to their photographs and films, we still know exactly how it looked today. Holtzman painstakingly recorded the compositions Mondrian had created on the walls by tracing them and remounting them on wooden panels. Holtzman exhibited them as “The Wall Works”.
The painting Victory Boogie Woogie sat on the easel unfinished when Mondrian died on 1 February 1944. He had been working on it since June 1942, having declared that there was still “too much of the old in it”. In November 1943, after a prolonged effort, he finally felt that the painting was finished, yet he continued to work on it. In mid-January 1944, once again, he decided it was virtually done. All that remained was to paint in a small corner.
But in the last week of his life Mondrian dramatically changed the painting’s composition yet again. He covered up painted areas of colour with tape or cardboard, often in different colours, and slightly moved others to make the overall work even more dynamic. He had intended to replace the bits of tape and paper with paint, as he had in his other New York works, but this time he would not get the chance. And so these strips of coloured paper and tape are part of the work as we know it today. It offers a rare glimpse into Mondrian’s method of creation and brings the artist’s hand close.
Though unfinished, Victory Boogie Woogie shows that Mondrian had found a new way of visualising the rhythms of spontaneous, improvised boogie-woogie music and the energy of a lively metropolis – indeed, of life itself. In this work, more than ever before, he achieves the fusion of dynamism and harmony he had been striving for for decades.
New York was the last city Piet Mondrian lived in. The buzzing metropolis, pulsing with the beat of boogie-woogie, gave him energy to push his work in new directions. There may not be much of Mondrian’s Manhattan left today, but the Mondrian Route brings it back to life with the help of historic photography and your own imagination.