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Dancing in a Grid: Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie

What are the signs that a cultural capital is shifting? Is it when artists start to leave? When investors arrive? When Disney builds a theme park? This week, after reading about the new Disney opening in Dubai, I kept thinking about cities, rhythms, and how cultural gravity quietly moves from one place to another. It reminded me of a painting by Mondrian—one that feels like someone tuning in to a new city for the first time.

Author

Inbal Zakai
May 26, 2025

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Yellow lines

These are the streets, or maybe the beat. Mondrian doesn’t draw a map—but he sketches the feeling of one. The yellow isn’t passive. It pulses. It takes you somewhere.

Small colored squares 

Like blinking lights in a window, or snippets of sound in a jazz riff. Red, blue, white, yellow—they don’t repeat. They respond. They improvise.

Empty white blocks

Not blank. Just waiting. These are the pauses in the rhythm, the space between the notes. Every city needs silence to make the noise meaningful.

Fun Fact

Before New York, Mondrian spent years chasing perfection through stillness. His earlier paintings were quiet, ordered, almost like meditations—black lines, white blocks, a few primary colors. Every shape had to earn its place. Then came the city, suddenly, the grid wasn't a theory—it was traffic, rhythm, life. Broadway Boogie Woogie was his last painting, and his most alive. He didn’t abandon structure. He just taught it to dance.

Think About It 🤔 

Long before Paris or New York, Chang’an in China was the first great grid city—and a thriving cultural capital in its own right.

Where is the “center” today? Once it was Paris. Then New York. But maybe now it’s not even a place.
Maybe it’s Dubai. Or Instagram. Or a server farm somewhere in the desert.

Cities today are both real and virtual. We live in neighborhoods and in feeds. The way we move—swipe, scroll, zoom—is its own kind of urban rhythm.

How does it relate to the here and now? or What to say during casual conversation to show off your art knowledge?

Cultural Capitals on the Move – “Mondrian painted Broadway Boogie Woogie when New York became the new center of the art world—displacing Paris, just as Paris had displaced Rome, Athens, and Thebes before it. It made me think about how creative energy always migrates.”

Now have another Look!

And If You’re Up for More…

  1. Visit the Museo Nazionale Romano – Palazzo Altemps in Rome, where Egyptian, Greek, and Roman influences meet in marble. The sculptures here don’t just show bodies—they show how ideas travel.
    From Alexandria to Athens to the heart of the Empire, you can see culture in motion. Just like in Mondrian’s painting—but older, and quieter.

  2. Wander through the Near Eastern Antiquities wing of the Louvre, where Assyrian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts live side by side.
    It’s a map in objects—a record of how ideas, gods, and styles moved across empires. Some of the stones here have traveled farther than most people do in a lifetime.

Sometimes the most precise grids carry the most unexpected joy. I’d love to hear what Broadway Boogie Woogie makes you feel. Reply to this email or leave a comment.

Yours,
Inbal Z M

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