Nick Squires, Oct 29 2022
SUPPLIED/STUFF
Piet Mondrian’s famous painting, New York City 1 hung upside down for 75 years.
His avant-garde use of primary colours, sharp angles and straight lines made him a leading light in the abstract movement, but one of Piet Mondrian’s most famous artworks has been hanging upside down – probably for decades.
Curators have belatedly realised that New York City 1, which the Dutch artist produced when he was living in the US in 1941, has been wrongly hung ever since it first went on public display more than 75 years ago.
The mistake is perhaps forgivable, given that Mondrian did not sign the work, and the lines of coloured tape that it features have no obvious top and bottom.
The clue that the artwork was wrongly displayed came from a photograph taken of the artist’s studio in New York City in 1944.
In the photo, the artwork is resting on an easel, with tightly grouped blue, yellow and red adhesive stripes at the top.
In contrast, it has always been displayed with those stripes at the bottom.
The error was revealed by curators at a press conference on the eve of “Mondrian, Evolution”, an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum in Dusseldorf.
“Could it be that the orientation shown in the photo is the actual one Mondrian had intended?” said curator Susanne Meyer-Büser.
It had been wrongly hung ever since it was first shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1945, she said.
It may have been that it was turned over the wrong way when it was unpacked by museum staff.
There is another clue for what has been regarded until now as the top of the picture – the adhesive tape does not reach the edge of the canvas.
Mondrian would have worked from top to bottom, becoming less disciplined about the application of the tape as he got to the base of the artwork. So the ragged, torn endings should be at the bottom of the picture, not at the top.
Despite the decades-long error being discovered, curators at the exhibition in Dusseldorf have decided to display New York City 1 in the way it has always been shown – the wrong way up.
The work consists of fragile adhesive strips which have been hanging that way for more than seven decades.
“Maybe there is no right or wrong orientation at all,” said Meyer-Büser. “If I turn it upside down, I risk destroying it."
The exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth in 1872 and features 90 works which trace his development from landscape painter to master of the abstract.
The Mondrian mix-up is not the first time that MoMA has displayed an artwork upside down, according to the website ARTnews.
In 1961, during an exhibition of Henri Matisse paintings, a visitor noticed that his papercut, Le Bateau, was hung the wrong way up.
The visitor, a Wall Street stockbroker, was initially dismissed by museum curators and took the story to the New York Times.
Museum staff eventually realised that she was correct and rehung the artwork the right way up. “It was just carelessness,” said Monroe Wheeler, the director of exhibitions at the time.
The mistake was only discovered after six weeks and had gone unnoticed not just by curators but by more than 100,000 visitors, including Matisse’s son Pierre, an art dealer.
Born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands in 1872, Mondrian fled his home in Paris in 1938 as war loomed and moved to London.
When Nazi Germany started bombing London, he moved again, to New York City in 1940.
It was there that he produced some of his last masterpieces, including New York City I and Broadway Boogie Woogie before his death in 1944.
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