A piece by a famous abstract artist has been hung upside down for 75 years, it's just emerged
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.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."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.
"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".It will go on display at a show called Evolution in Dusseldorf, which opens on Saturday – where it will hang apparently incorrectly.