Piet Mondrian

In Piet Mondrian’s “New York City,” he uses his traditional method of layered lines, although this time he shifts away from using strictly black lines with primary-colored rectangles inside them to using primary-colored lines themselves in an uneven grid pattern. His use of line and positive and negative space predominates this picture, but the lines are all the same width and length, and the negative space is always rectangular. I don’t find this piece particularly beautiful or stimulating or meaningful. New York City itself is a lot of things, but I’ve never thought “uninteresting” to be a fitting adjective, so I don’t understand why Mondrian chose to call this non-representational piece “New York City.”