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Mondrian's intellectual tenacity remains startling. After the volte-face toward abstraction in 1911, there were no sudden switches in his work—only the steady, undistracted pursuit of the mathematical harmony that he glimpsed at the end of his experiences. Mondrian had fled to New York in 1940 to avoid the war and he was nearly 72 when he died there. But his great unfinished picture, Victory Boogie-Woogie, gathered all the dynamism and modernity that fascinated him in Manhattan into one comprehensive image. The blips of red, yellow and blue shuttling along the avenues of the grid, the slow blocks of gray, the orchestration of scale and pace —these constitute Mondrian's final answer to the critics who rebuked him for pushing art into "sterility." They were, of course, wrong: for Mondrian's work possessed that rich and exemplary gravity which only the puritan passions can release.