Leaving aside the likely remarks of non-fans of abstract art, a museum curator preparing an exhibit of paintings by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian discovered that one of the selected works, New York City 1, has been hanging upside down for seventy-five years.
The painting was made in the early 1940s, shortly before Mondrian's death. It's unsigned, so he may have considered it unfinished. It was first shown at New York's MoMA in 1945, and has been in a Dusseldorf museum since 1980.
Susanne Meyer-Büser, putting together a major Mondrian exhibit, began to suspect the error on seeing a 1944 photo of Mondrian's studio in which the painting can be seen with more strips of painted tape at the top than at the bottom. Similar pictures made by Mondrian are oriented that way also.
Interpreters have suggested that the thicker area at the bottom represented the built city with the lighter coverage at the top representing a skyline, but others now suggest that the darker area, if viewed at the top, represents a dark sky into which the buildings reach.
In any case, it appears not to be possible to correct the error, and the painting hangs upside down in the new exhibition. “The adhesive tapes are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” Meyer-Büser said. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story.”
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