A painting by the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian it has been hanging upside down in various museums for 75 years, an art historian has discovered, and reports ‘The Guardian’, with one final warning from the expert: the work could be destroyed if hung upside down.
The piece, a network of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes entitled ‘New York City I, 1941‘, was first exhibited at MoMA in 1945, but since 1980 it has been in the art collection of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf.
The way the image is currently hung shows the multicolored lines thickening at the bottom, however when the curator Susanne Meyer-Buser began to investigate the new museum exhibition on the artist realized that the image should be upside down.
“The grid thickening should be at the top, like a dark sky,” Meyer-Brüser said. “Once I pointed it out to the other stewards, we realized it was very obvious. I am 100% sure the image is upside down».
The indicators that suggest a wrong hangup are multiple. From the fact that a painting of the same name at the Pompidou in Paris has those thick lines at the top to the fact that, directly, a photo of Mondrian’s studio taken a few days after his death shows the same image on an easel turned upside down.
Part of the confusion must have arisen because the work is not signed, a sign that it was not finished. Despite all this, the work will be shown as it has always been exhibited for 75 years. “The adhesive tapes are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” says Meyer-Brüser. «If you turned it upside down now, gravity would pull it in another direction.. And now it is part of the history of the work, ”explains the specialist to ‘The Guardian’.