Mondrian- Broadway Boogie-Woogie

Charles Bouleau claimed that Mondrian used such armatures governed by the Golden Ratio to define his compositions. Unfortunately, his demonstration of this principle was far less plausible than many of his other analyses, so we will be walking step-by-step through this connection.

Here is the unfolded half-diagonal section of the square painting, so as to form a Golden Rectangle.

The successively smaller squares constructed along this rectangle’s diagonal locate the heights of the red lines shown at left, each of which forms the top margin for one of Mondrian’s streetlike color strips.

The orange rectangle at upper left is actually a Golden Rectangle in terms of proportion; its bottom edge aligns with the lower red horizontal, and its right margin defines one of the main verticals in the painting.

An arc swung up from the lower right corner of the painting through the intersection of this vertical and the second horizontal rises to height .441, a level through which is a green horizontal, which again forms the top edge of a color strip. The green rectangle and square above this level locate the right edges of two vertical color strips.

The blue square and rectangle within the green square serve a similar function on a smaller scale.

A few more constructions based on diagonals locate features such as the large blue rectangle in the painting’s upper right quadrant, and the horizontal color strip immediately above it, at height .842. With its insistently rectilinear articulation, Broadway Boogie Woogie might seem to represent the very antithesis of compass-based circular thinking. To the extent that its proportions were based on those of the Golden Rectangle, though, it contains circles below its surface.

This painting is the property of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This analysis was based on the image: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78682