New York City (version 2)

Imagine looking down at Manhattan from a great height, then erasing everything except the pulse of its traffic. That was Piet Mondrian's aim in this 1942 painting. He had recently arrived in New York in 1940 after leaving a Europe torn apart by war, and the city's buzz lit something up in him. Lines of red, yellow, and blue race across the canvas like streams of cars, snatches of jazz, and neon signs all pressed into one neat weave.

Best known for reducing painting to its bare bones of straight lines and a handful of pure colors, Mondrian tried something different here. Rather than the thick black bands that define much of his earlier work, he stacked strips of bright color over and under one another, letting them cross like woven threads. The trick fools the eye a little, giving a flat surface an unexpected feeling of layers and motion.

Left unfinished, this version offers a rare peek behind the curtain of Mondrian's process. His decisions sit frozen mid-thought, colors still shifting into place. For an artist so tied to precision and balance, it shows a restless side, one still tinkering, still chasing the beat of a city he had grown to love.