A German museum has made a surprising discovery: one of his paintings has probably hung upside down for years. It is a work of Piet Mondrian.
The work is made up of clean lines of colored ribbon and has probably been hung upside down for decades in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, a museum in the German city of Düsseldorf. A layman would never notice, but art connoisseurs should know better.
The work was compared by the museum with a photo from 1944, and this is how the mistake came to light. This was announced by the same museum on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition in honor of Mondrian’s 150th birthday, who lived from 1872 to 1944. The photo shows the closest stripes at the top of the painting, just like on an almost identical painting that is located at the Center Pompidou in Paris. According to curator Susanne Meyer-Büser, the path of the ribbon also indicates that the work is hanging upside down.
Photo: Achim Kukulies
New York 1 it was made by Mondriaan in 1941. Since 1980 the painting has been part of the collection of the German museum, which has no intention of restoring it. “If I turn the work, I can damage it,” says Meyer-Büser a The mirror. According to her, the inverted suspension is part of the painting’s history. It may have been hung up by mistake since 1945, when it was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Art.
