In October 2022, curators discovered that Piet Mondrian’s tape-and-paint work New York City had been hanging upside down for over 75 years, and decided to leave it that way rather than damage the fragile adhesive. This episode follows the walking contradiction behind the grids: a lentil-eating ascetic terrified of spiders and eye injuries who avoided romance as a distraction, yet danced the Charleston in jazz clubs with rigid, unsmiling intensity.

We trace his path from traditional Hague School landscapes and quietly painted flowers through pointillism, Fauvism, and Cubism, the influence of Theosophy that made him treat the physical world as an illusion, and the wartime isolation in the Netherlands where he co-founded De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg and wrote the rules of neoplasticism. The conversation covers the evolution of the grid from thin gray lines to heavy black borders, the Paris studio he turned into a living painting, Marlow Moss’s influence on his double lines, his flight from fascism to Manhattan, and the final Boogie Woogie canvases that abandoned black lines entirely.

• How his tree paintings straightened branch by branch until only a lattice remained
• Why green and curves were outlawed as earthly distractions from universal truth
• Why a real Mondrian canvas is textured and physical rather than flat
• How New York’s skyscrapers and jazz rhythm changed his last works
• How his grids reached Yves Saint Laurent dresses, Nike sneakers, and 50-million-dollar auctions