Officials from a museum in the German city of Dusseldorf discovered that a painting exhibited at the site by Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian hung the wrong way for 77 years.
A major retrospective exhibition by the Dutch painter opened on Saturday at the Kunsthalleung Museum, which included among its highlights the “New York City 1” exhibition, completed in 1941, but the museum revealed this week that this painting was hung for decades at the site upside down.
“In a photograph from 1944, I saw that the painting was hanging in the opposite direction,” exhibition curator Susanne Meyer-Busser told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
The painting, made up of red, yellow and blue lines that intersect at right angles, was then exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York “the following year,” erroneously, according to Meyer Poser.
When it was sent to the Dusseldorf Museum in 1980, the painting was rearranged in the same way. The mistake could be due to the fact that “the painting has no signature,” according to Meyer Busser.
The direction of his exhibition was therefore determined in reference to the “name of the artist engraved on the back of the frame by the benefactor”, at the time of Mondrian’s death in 1944.
Born in 1872, Piet Mondrian is a key figure in the Dutch art movement “De Stijl” (“Style”), known for its horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors.
In 1940 the painter left for New York. The rectilinear grids of his paintings are inspired by the planning of the American city and its skyscrapers.
He is world famous for his painting “Victory Boogie Woogie”, considered one of the most important works of art of the 20th century.
