The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, among many European artists escaping World War II. He fell in love with the city and its culture, incorporating the spirit of its boogie-woogie music into his abstract, geometric paintings. Mondrian found the syncopated beat and improvisational aesthetic of jazz akin to what he called, in his own work, the “construction through continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm.”