ARTnews: Mondrian masterwork discovered upside down since 1945
Oops! Curator at K20 Museum in Germany announces the mistake decades in the making
By Daniel Cassady
Oct. 27 — At a press conference on the eve of Mondrian. Evolution, a Piet Mondrian exhibition at Germany’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 museum, curator Susanne Meyer-Büser announced that the exhibition’s highlight, New York City 1 (1941), has been displayed upside down since it was first seen in public, German publication Monopol reported Thursday.
The first clue that the painting, an adhesive tape version of the similarly named New York (which hangs right-side up in Paris at the Centre Pompidou), was hung incorrectly came from a photograph of the artist’s studio in taken in 1944, shortly after he passed away, the curator said at the press conference. In the photo, New York City 1 can be seen on an easel with the tightly grouped yellow, blue, and black stripes at the top.
“Could it be that the orientation shown in the photo is the actual one Mondrian had intended?” the curator asked. According to Meyer-Büser the picture was first shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1945. There, too, the thick grouping of stripes was shown at the bottom of the work instead of at the top. “Was it coincidence, was it oversight?” she said, adding that perhaps it was flipped over while being unpacked at MoMA over 75 years ago. …
