For more than 75 years, a work by Mondrian has been displayed upside down

by Redazione , published on 28/10/2022
Categories: News / Disclaimer
Piet Mondrian's work "New York City 1" would have been displayed for over seventy-five years in the opposite direction, upside down.

At the press conference for the exhibition Mondrian Evolution at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, scheduled to run from October 29, 2022 to February 12, 2023, curator Susanne Meyer-Büser said that the work New York City 1, created by Mondrian in 1941, has been on public display for more than seventy-five years upsidedown.

According to the curator, the painting was first displayed to the public in 1945 at MoMA New York, already upside down. “An oversight?” she wonders. Giving the clue to the wrong direction would have been a photograph showing the work in the artist’s studio shortly after his death in 1944. In the photo, it was noted that the stripes are arranged in a more grouped manner at the top, as in the similar work preserved at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. However, it was Italian artist Francesco Visalli who would be the first to give the report, and in September 2021 he sent an email to the museum’s director, Anette Kruszyinski, attaching studies and period images to support the theory.

Meyer-Büser thinks Mondrian made his work from top to bottom, weaving and overlapping the strips of colored tape in that direction. Moreover, in what is currently the top of the painting (thus perhaps the bottom in the correct direction), the tape is torn and does not reach the edge of the canvas-another clue that confirms the top-down direction.

In the exhibition, however, the painting will be hung as it has been since 1945, with the grouping of the stripes at the bottom, and this is also how it was included in the catalog.

For more than 75 years, a work by Mondrian has been displayed upside down
For more than 75 years, a work by Mondrian has been displayed upside down


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