New York City

In 1942 Piet Mondrian painted one of his final works titled New York City. The painting marked a distinct deviation from the typical 'Mondrian style,' which the artist had first established more than twenty years earlier. An important contributor to the group of work known as De Stijl, Mondrian spent over 40 years championing the non-representational philosophy, which he termed Neo-Plasticism, referring to a design philosophy for the new age.

New York City is currently housed within the Louvre, Paris and is described as oil on canvas, which is approximately 4ft by 5ft in size. The piece is different from earlier works because it abandons the characteristic thick black lines on a white background separating rectangles of color for something all-together different. The artist trades in his black lines for colored ones and paints them intertwining across each other. He achieves a new sort of flatness when compared to earlier works. Mondrian's strict visual style of non-representational abstraction is beginning to become slightly more relaxed in his old age. Slight is certainly the correct word to use and while he is offering some interpretation in conveying a street layout of New York, is still purely minimalistic.

Neo-Plasticism influenced the Bauhaus and eventually the International style of design because the modernist principals of the De Stijl were an ideal building block to usher in the new era of technology. The case could be made that after over 40 years of a dedication to art and design as a principled endeavor, Mondrian began to sense the world had changed and embodied this feeling in his painting of New York City's busy infrastructure.