Mondrian painting hung upside down for 75 years

Few abstract artists were as rigorous about form and design as Piet Mondrian. So the Dutch painter probably wouldn't be too pleased to learn that one of his paintings has been hanging upside down for the last 75 years. The composition of new york city 1 (1941) is a grid with yellow, blue, black and red lines. Experts now think the canvas may have been inverted as early as 1945 when it was installed at MoMA, an error that may have resulted from the way it was packaged and shipped. The artist unfortunately was not around to correct the supposed mistake, as he had already died a year earlier, in 1944.

The gaffe was only discovered this year by curator Susanne Meyer-Büser while planning “Mondrian. Evolution”, a new exhibition dedicated to the modernist at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 in Düsseldorf, Germany. The work entered the museum's collection in 1980. Susanne Meyer-Büser declared at the press conference that she only discovered this error when she was researching more about the work's past and found a photograph of it in the artist's studio in 1944. The image it showed the painting supported by an easel, contrary to what it had always been seen. Inverting the composition would mean that the tight grouping of lines traditionally found at the bottom really should be at the top – matching the orientation of very similar work, new york city (1942), present at the Center Pompidou in Paris. With these clues in mind, the curator also studied the tape on the canvas and found that the way the layers are arranged suggests that Mondrian must have worked from top to bottom. The borders at the bottom (which until now has been understood as the top) are therefore less neat and in one place half a centimeter is missing. This physical evidence was considered the most convincing by the Meyer-Büser team of restorers, who now consider his claim to be true. Still, despite Meyer-Büser's discovery, the painting will be displayed in the same way since 1945 for fear of causing damage to the fragile work. The curator considers this mistake to be just part of her long story. “Perhaps there is no right or wrong alignment?” suggested to the German magazine Monopol.