#grid

He turned a square canvas onto its corner to hang like a diamond — not a one-off trick, he kept coming back to the format for years.

This one's built from strips of coloured tape rather than paint, and it was never finished. A curator worked out a few years back that it's likely been hanging upside down since the 1940s — and from what I've read they're leaving it that way, because the tape has gone so fragile that turning it now could take the whole thing apart.

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.

They say he kept a handwritten catalogue of every single thing he made, numbering each one as it left the easel — the pencilled line along the bottom edge is his own filing, not a museum label.

Mondrian, from what I've read, believed grids like this could help build a calmer, more honest world after the first World War — a strict visual language everyone could read the same way.

I couldn't dig up much on this specific one — Mondrian made dozens of these grid paintings in the early 1920s, and I can't find what set this particular one apart from the rest.

According to what I've read, around this time Mondrian narrowed his palette down to red, yellow, blue, black, white and grey and nothing else, chasing the De Stijl idea that a painting could be stripped to its barest elements and still hold together. This is one of the grid paintings people mean when they say 'Neoplasticism.'