Time.news – An important abstract painting by Piet Mondrian was exhibited for 42 years on the reverse of the verse in which it was painted: the admission of the error came from the Dusseldorf North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection which houses the work, on the occasion of the exhibition for the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Dutch painter, founder of ‘neoplasticism’, “Mondrian.Evolution”.
It is “New York City 1”, a work of 1941 composed of red, yellow and blue horizontal and vertical adhesive strips, which arrived at the museum in 1980. “Unlike Mondrian’s almost ‘twin’ oil painting exhibited at the Center Pompidou in Paris, the tape image was rotated 180 degrees shortly after Mondrian’s death in 1944,” explained curator Susanne Meyer. -Buser.
The art historian has presented several pieces of evidence to support her thesis including a photo taken in the artist’s studio where the work stands on the easel and has a different orientation.
In particular in the photo the denser strips are located on the upper edge and therefore flow exactly like the oil painting of Paris. The trend of the adhesive strips with the edges also confirmed the suspicion that “New York City 1” has been turned upside down.
hangs this one #Mondrian in the Düsseldorf art collection upside down for years? A photo gave the clue: It shows the work “New York City 1” created in 1941 shortly after Mondrian’s death in his studio. In the photo, the denser stripes are at the top edge. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/ExFDHCuiUC
— ZDF State Studio North Rhine-Westphalia (@ZDFnrw) October 27, 2022
The museum, however, has expressed its intention to keep the work in the current position in which it had been included in the Catalog Raisonné of the Gallery. Errors of this kind are not new to the art world: in 1961 the Moma in New York exhibited Henri Matisse’s “Le Bateau” in reverse and only after 47 days was the incongruity reported even to the French artist’s son.
It was an abstract ‘gouache’ made with scraps of paper and to discover the curators’ blunder was a Wall Street stockbroker, Genevieve Habert, who told it to the New York Times. The work was only shot after two months, by which time the exhibition was ending.
A similar slip occurred at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015 for a work by Jackson Pollock that the artist had thought horizontal but which was exhibited vertically for the “America is Hard to See” exhibition. In that case, however, the curators adhered to the direction in which the work was already exhibited at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery.