SFMOMA, Part 5: New York City 2.
In SFMOMA's collection — not on view at the moment — is a vertical canvas, about forty-five by thirty-nine inches, that looks at first like every Mondrian you have ever seen. A grid. White ground, straight lines, red and yellow and blue and black. Then you look closer and the painting starts to come apart. Most of the vertical lines are not painted at all. They are strips of off-white paper tape, stuck to the canvas, their edges lifting slightly, glossy where they catch the light. A single thumbtack pins one strip to the surface at the left, its round head the size of a pinprick. The horizontal bands — black, yellow, gray, a band of blue near the bottom — are painted and matte. The verticals — cream, red, yellow — are tape, and they run over the top of everything, crossing the painted bands without apology, overlapping each other at the intersections. Near the bottom right edge there is a small red scribble, like a note to self. The grid is not quite regular; the verticals do not fall into a strict rhythm. They look placed. Provisional. Like they could be moved tomorrow.
This is Piet Mondrian's New York City 2 [unfinished, formerly New York City III], dated 1941. The medium is oil, charcoal, graphite, thumbtacks, paper laminate, and paper tape on canvas. It measures 45 1/4 × 38 7/8 inches. SFMOMA acquired it in 1998, purchased through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis — the Bay Area philanthropist whose name is on the museum's theater and whose giving shaped whole chapters of the collection. The museum owns it outright.
The easy reading is brand recognition. A Mondrian is the most imitated composition in modern art — the grid that ended up on Yves Saint Laurent dresses in 1965 and on a million dorm-room posters after that. You could hang this on a wall and half the room would nod without looking twice. But the subject of this painting is not the grid. It is the tape. By 1941 Mondrian had stopped trusting paint to do his thinking for him. He worked out his compositions in strips of colored paper tape that he could move, remove, and reposition — try a red line here today, shift it an inch tomorrow, live with it for a week. New York City 2 is what that process looks like when the artist never gets to the next step. The draft became the work. What hangs in the vault is a painting caught mid-sentence, and the sentence was never finished.
1872–1912: Learning to see
Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, in the Netherlands, in 1872, and began as a painter of the Dutch landscape — trees, rivers, farmhouses, church towers — rendered in a moody, almost Symbolist naturalism. Nothing about the early work predicts the grids. What predicts them is the compression: over two decades he squeezed the landscape flatter and flatter, testing how much could be removed before the subject disappeared. In 1912 he moved to Paris and walked straight into Cubism, which finished the job the Dutch years had started. The trees came apart into planes. The planes came apart into lines. By the time war sent him back to Holland in 1914, he was done with depiction for good.
1917–1938: The system
In 1917, with Theo van Doesburg, Mondrian co-founded the magazine De Stijl and announced the program he called neoplasticism — "pure plastic art." The rules were absolute and few: only horizontal and vertical lines, only the primary colors (red, blue, yellow) plus black, white, and gray. No curves. No texture for its own sake. No reference to anything you could point at in the world. Underneath the rules was something close to religion. Mondrian was a lifelong Theosophist, convinced that beneath appearances there is a universal order, and that a painting of perfectly balanced opposites could make it visible. The horizontal line, he said, was nature; the vertical was spirit. A canvas was not a picture of harmony. It was harmony, made.
The Paris years, 1919 to 1938, are the work everyone knows: white planes divided by black lines, blocks of primary color locked between them, the compositions growing sparer and stricter as the decades passed until the color nearly vanished and only the black armature remained. It looked like the opposite of self-expression — no brushwork to admire, no personality on display, just relations. Through the twenties and thirties the paintings got stricter still. The black lines thickened and took precedence; the color blocks shrank into accents, then nearly vanished. At one point he was painting double black lines with nothing between them but white — the most severe pictures anyone had ever made, and they sold. The system had no room for doubt, which is exactly what makes the New York work startling: the same man, ten years later, pinning tape to a wall because he could no longer decide where a line should go. The man, meanwhile, was nothing like the work. By every account Mondrian was sociable, a sharp dresser, a passionate dancer who argued loudly about music. The severity was the painting, not the painter.
1938–1940: The crossing
As war closed in, Mondrian left Paris for London in 1938. Two years later, with the Blitz hammering the city, the sixty-eight-year-old painter got on a ship. On October 3, 1940, he sailed into New York Harbor aboard the RMS Samaria — a refugee with a famous name, arriving in a country whose art world barely knew what to do with him. He had spent thirty years building the most controlled painting in Europe. He had come to the least controlled city on earth.
1940: New York
That first night, his friend the young American artist Harry Holtzman played him some records. Boogie woogie — percussive blues piano, fast and loud, built on repetition with variation, played by Black musicians out of the American South and carried north with the Great Migration. Mondrian went to hear it live at Café Society, New York's first integrated nightclub, where Albert Ammons, Meade "Lux" Lewis, and Pete Johnson held court at the pianos. He was in his late sixties and he had found a new rhythm, and it went straight into the work. The European grids had been about equilibrium — everything locked, nothing moving. The New York paintings are about syncopation. He loosened the black lines, broke them into colored segments, let the grid stutter and swing. In his own words, the new work was "more boogie woogie."
1941: Tape
The method changed with the music. Instead of painting a line and living with it, Mondrian began laying down strips of colored paper tape — on the canvas, on the studio walls — stepping back, moving them, living with them for days. The studio became the laboratory. When he moved to 15 East 59th Street in 1943, he pinned colored rectangles directly to the white walls and rearranged them at will; visitors walked into a room that was itself an unfinished Mondrian, with fruit-crate furniture painted white and jazz records stacked by the easel. After his death, Holtzman filmed and photographed the entire studio before taking it apart, so we know exactly what it looked like.
New York City 2 was made in 1941, right in the middle of this conversion, and you can see both Mondrians in it at once. The painted horizontals are the old one — matte, committed, final. The taped verticals are the new one — glossy, provisional, still open to argument. The red strip running down the center and the yellow one at the right are not painted lines. They are decisions, caught before they hardened. The thumbtack is the whole method in miniature: nothing here is final, everything can move.
The tape was not a shortcut. It was the opposite of one — a way of refusing to decide until the decision was right. A painted line is a commitment; a taped line is a question. Mondrian had spent thirty years making commitments. In New York he went back to asking questions, and he asked them the way he had always worked: slowly, in the studio, moving a strip an inch and living with it for a week. What is unusual is not that he worked this way — it is that we get to see it. The finished Mondrians hide their labor completely. This one hides nothing.
It is worth saying that unfinished, for Mondrian, was a working condition, not an accident. He was known to keep canvases open for years, carrying them from city to city and reworking them — one of his paintings carries two dates, years apart, for two campaigns in two countries. New York City 2 is the extreme case of a lifelong habit: the reworking simply never ended.
1942–1944: Boogie Woogie
The conversion culminated in the two paintings everyone knows. Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43, now at MoMA) dissolves the grid into a shower of small color blocks that looks like Manhattan from above and sounds like a piano — the most joyful painting he ever made. Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44) was still on the easel, unfinished, when Mondrian died of pneumonia in New York on February 1, 1944. He had been in America less than four years. The refugee who arrived with a European style left behind an American one.
1998–2026: San Francisco
New York City 2 came to SFMOMA in 1998, bought with money Phyllis Wattis gave the museum. Wattis — who with her husband built one of the great Bay Area records of arts philanthropy — had a habit of giving SFMOMA the works that completed its story of the twentieth century. A Mondrian that shows the work thinking, rather than the brand-name grid, was exactly that kind of gift: not the icon but the evidence of how the icon got made. Wattis died in 2002. The theater that carries her name is still the room where SFMOMA shows its films, and the painting she bought is still the clearest evidence in the collection of how a masterpiece gets made.
The museum has kept finding uses for it. While Snøhetta's expansion was going up, SFMOMA's own magazine paired New York City 2 with photographs of the construction site — steel, scaffolding, a building caught mid-thought beside a painting caught mid-thought. And in March 2026 the painting became one of thirty-four SFMOMA works to enter Samsung's Art Store, which means New York City 2 is now hanging in living rooms all over the world — tape, thumbtack, red scribble and all — on television screens.
Mondrian spent thirty years perfecting the grid and his last three years pulling it apart. New York City 2 is the pulling-apart, stopped in progress. The tape was supposed to be temporary. Eighty-five years later, it is the painting. 🌁
Timeline — Mondrian and New York City 2
1872 — Piet Mondrian born in Amersfoort, Netherlands
1912 — moves to Paris; encounters Cubism
1914 — returns to Holland for the war years; the work goes fully abstract
1917 — co-founds De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg; neoplasticism
1919 — first grid-based paintings
1938 — leaves Paris for London as war approaches
1940 — sails to New York; arrives October 3 aboard the RMS Samaria; hears boogie woogie
1941 — makes New York City 2 (then called New York City III), working the composition out in colored paper tape
1942–43 — Broadway Boogie Woogie (MoMA)
1943–44 — studio at 15 East 59th Street; Victory Boogie Woogie begun
1944 — dies in New York, February 1
1998 — SFMOMA acquires New York City 2 through Phyllis C. Wattis's gift
2026 — the painting joins Samsung's Art Store in SFMOMA's debut collection of thirty-four works