The true story of Mondrian’s painting hung upside down for 77 years: the discovery thanks to the intuition of an Italian artist

A picture of Piet Mondrian he spent 77 years hanging “upside down”. This is the famous opera “New York City 1 (unfinished)” by 1941. To report the news is the Reuters who interviewed the curator of the Evolution exhibition at the K20 in Düsseldorfin Germany, which revealed “the error”. It was actually the Italian artist who realized that the famous painting was exposed in the wrong direction Francesco Visalli who already in September 2021 had promptly informed, via e-mail, the director of the museum, Annette Kruszynski, of her intuition. “She thanked me for the information I provided and told me that she would have included it in the curatorial file as it lacked certain information”, explained Visalli, who has been conducting studies and research on Mondrian for more than 15 years, to The print. Meanwhile, Wietse Coppes, editor of the Mondrian Edition Project and art historian of the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History), has also confirmed that the discovery is attributable to Visalli.

In the past few hours, it was the art historian Susanne Meyer-Büser who said she noticed the anomaly during the preparation of the exhibition at the K20 in Düsseldorf, saying she was “one hundred percent” sure that the painting had been hung upside down. A photo taken in Mondrian’s own studiobefore moving to the MoMA in New York in 1945, where the painting was already hanging upside down, he immortalized the painting in another sense. Another clue is also in the lines that characterize the painting, in a similar canvas, in fact, as reported by the Post, they are denser at the top, while in this they thicken at the bottom. And according to Meyer-Büser it is more appropriate for them to thicken at the top, as if to represent a dark sky.

It is not known, however, why the painting was shot up to now but it will hardly be overturned now. The curator in fact explained to Reuters that the movement would jeopardize the work, made with colored adhesive tapes and depicting the stylized skyline of New York. Turning it, in fact, some already precarious tapes could come off. In addition to distorting the history of a work.