Mondrian painting hung upside down for 77 years

A painting by Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down for 77 years, says a curator at the Deutsches Museum.

A major retrospective of the avant-garde artist’s work is on display Saturday at the Kunsthammlung Museum in Düsseldorf, and one of the works on display is “New York City 1,” painted in 1941.

However, while preparing the exhibition, curator Susanne Meyer-Buser realized that the painting had been presented to the public quite differently than perhaps it was intended.

“I saw the canvas upside down on an easel in a 1944 photograph. It intrigued me,” Meyer-Buser told the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung.

According to the curator, the painting, which consists of multiple lines of blue, red, and yellow that intersect at right angles, was exhibited at MoMA in New York the wrong way.

In 1980 it was transferred to the Düsseldorf Museum where it was exhibited in the same way.

According to Meyer-Buser, the error may have occurred because “the painting has no signature.”

The decision to present the work in a decades-old fashion probably coincided with the “artist’s name engraved on the back of the frame by the custodians of (the artist’s estate)” when Mondrian died in 1944. was determined by

Born in 1872, Mondrian was a prominent representative of the 1920s abstract art movement known as “De Stijl” and one of the most influential figures in 20th century contemporary art.

In 1940 he moved to New York, where the skyscrapers and city layout inspired his horizon. He died in New York in his 1944.

His most famous work is “Triumph Boogie-Woogie”, considered one of the most important works of the 20th century.

https://www.expatica.com/nl/general/mondrian-painting-hanging-upside-down-for-77-years-377897/ Mondrian painting hung upside down for 77 years

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