Love of Jazz

Mondrian was keen on all the most up-to-the-minute music, from Arnold Schönberg to the Charleston and from Josephine Baker to boogie woogie. Whenever possible, he used the money from his work to buy gramophone records. In his spare time, he went to clubs and bars with live music. The music he heard echoes through his paintings.

Forget harmony!
Mondrian was a fan not only of jazz, but of pretty much all avant-garde music. This included atonal music, in which the composer used notes and the rhythm they produced, but did not attempt to produce a melody. This was precisely what Mondrian was aiming for in his paintings: disconnected notes and rhythm on canvas. He had a group of musical friends with whom he went to concerts and philosophised about art. When his friend Jakob van Domselaer presented his composition Experiments in Artistic Style in the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), the public was anything but enthusiastic. But Mondrian dominated the heated discussion that followed the performance, arguing that this was the future.

The Dancing Madonna
Mondrian was passionate about dancing. When he lived in the artist enclave of Laren during the First World War, he spent many evenings dancing at the village’s Hotel Hamdorff. His stylized steps and angular movements made him such a conspicuous figure on the dance floor that he was soon nicknamed ‘the Dancing Madonna’.

Cheetah
In Paris, Mondrian frequented the bars americains, where people danced the Charleston, the Foxtrot and the Shimmy. The Charleston was banned in the Netherlands as ‘obscene’: typical, he thought. He refused to go there so long as the ban remained in force. But in his opinion there was only one person who could dance it perfectly, and that was Josephine Baker. She performed in exotic outfits and sometimes even took a cheetah on stage with her.

No room for records
In 1938, feeling threatened by the Nazis, Mondrian fled to London. He could take very little with him. He dispatched important artworks in advance and his luggage contained only an easel, some clothes and his bedsheets. He left his record collection with a friend called Maud van Loon, who eventually donated it to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

New York boogie
When Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, he was exhausted from the two-week sea crossing. Even so, his friend Harry Holtzman wouldn’t let him go to bed until he’d heard the latest music: the boogie woogie. Mondrian was immediately mad about it and soon learned the dance. He thought the rhythm of the music exactly matched that of the city. He tried to capture the energy it radiated in his paintings, culminating in the Victory Boogie Woogie.