'We realised it was obvious!' Famous artwork displayed the wrong way up for 75 years
28 October 2022, 20:13
Art lovers have been left in a spin after experts realised a painting has been displayed upside down for more than 70 years.
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But New York City I, a piece by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, a lattice of yellow, red, blue and black tapes, could fall apart if curators try to put it the right way round.
The piece, from 1941, was first in public view at MoMA in New York four years after it was made.
It has been in Dusseldorf, the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia, a German state, since 1980.
The tape gets darker towards the bottom of the artwork, and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum curator Susanne Meyer-Buser realised that should actually be a dark skyline as she carried out research on Dutch avant garde art.
The breakthrough came a photo emerged of Mondrian's studio in New York in 1944, which showed the artwork the other way up.
"Could it be that the orientation shown in the photo is the actual one Mondrian had intended?" Ms Meyer-Buser asked.
"The thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky.
"Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious. I am 100% certain the picture is the wrong way around."
But rotating it correctly carries a risk.
"Maybe there is no right or wrong orientation at all. If I turn it upside down, I risk destroying it," she said, suggesting someone could have made a mistake when taking the work out of the box, or that the transit was "sloppy".
The artwork is unsigned because Mondrian did not think it was finished.
It will go on display at a show called Evolution in Dusseldorf, which opens on Saturday – where it will hang apparently incorrectly.
