Cracking the Mondrian Code (2017)
When the artist Piet Mondrian died in the winter of 1944 at the age of 71, he was in the midst of working on a painting he had told people would be the definitive expression of his aesthetic ideals. The work, entitled “Victory Boogie Woogie,” in homage to American jazz, had absorbed his entire focus for more than a year. In the last ten days of his life, while suffering from acute bronchitis, he worked on the painting to the exclusion of all else, tacking onto the canvas small squares of colore