Museum of Modern Art — New York, NY, USA

He'd not long landed in New York when he made this, and it's said he was mad about boogie-woogie records and dancing — the title's the music, not just the street. Supposedly the little coloured blocks are the city seen from above, all traffic and lights, though I couldn't find him ever spelling that out himself.

He was living in an asylum in the south of France when he made this, and it's roughly the view out of his bedroom window before dawn, with a village added that wasn't actually there. According to Wikipedia he didn't rate it much himself — in his letters he wrote it off as a failure.

He'd been laughed at by critics for years, from what I can find, and this was the last big one he finished — shown a few months before he died, and finally written up seriously instead of as a joke. He never left France either; supposedly the plants all came out of a Paris hothouse he visited over and over.

He was a toll clerk who painted on his days off, and the critics of his day mostly treated him as a joke. From what I've read he tried to sell this one to the mayor of his home town, who wasn't interested, and it then dropped out of sight for years before a dealer turned it up again in the 1920s.

It's the third of three squares he painted — black first, then red, then this one. The idea, as far as I understand it, was to strip painting back to nothing but feeling, and it came the year after the revolution, when everything around him was being pulled apart and rebuilt too.

Painted while he was teaching at the Bauhaus, a school better known for chairs and lettering than for cats. The bird up on the forehead isn't a bird in the room, from what I've read — it's meant to be what the cat has in mind.