A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found, but warned it could disintegrate if it was hung the right side up now.
The 1941 picture, a complex interlacing lattice of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes titled New York City I, was first put on display at New York’s MoMA in 1945 but has hung at the art collection of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf since 1980.
The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicoloured lines thickening at the bottom, suggesting an extremely simplified version of a skyline. However, when curator Susanne Meyer-Büser started researching the museum’s new show on the Dutch avant garde artist earlier this year, she realised the picture should be the other way around.
“The thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky,” said Meyer-Büser. “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.”
Indicators suggesting an incorrect hanging are multifold. The similarly named and same-sized oil painting, New York City, which is on display in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, has the thickening of lines at the top.
A photograph of Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after the artist’s death and published in American lifestyle magazine Town and Country in June 1944, also shows the same picture sitting on an easel the other way up.
Meyer-Büser said it was likely that Mondrian worked by starting his intricate layering with a line right at the top of the frame and then worked his way down, which would also explain why some of the yellow lines stop a few millimetres short of the bottom edge.
“Was it a mistake when someone removed the work from its box? Was someone being sloppy when the work was in transit?”, the curator said. “It’s impossible to say.”
Part of the problem is that unlike most of Mondrian’s earlier works, New York City I does not bear the artist’s signature, possibly because he hadn’t deemed it finished.
In spite of all the evidence pointing to the work being currently displayed upside down, the work will be shown the way it has hung for 75 years in the new Mondrian. Evolution show that opens in Düsseldorf on Saturday.
“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.”
• This article was amended on 28 October 2022 because an earlier version misspelled Susanne Meyer-Büser’s surname in several places. This has been corrected.
