Mondrian hung upside-down for over 75 years – ARTnews.com

At a press convention on the eve of Mondrian. Evolution, a Piet Mondrian exhibition at Germany’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 museum, curator Susanne Meyer-Büser declared that the exhibition’s spotlight, New York Town 1 (1941), has been displayed upside down considering that it was initial noticed in community, German publication Monopol documented Thursday. 

The first clue that the portray, an adhesive tape version of the in the same way named New York (which hangs appropriate-aspect up in Paris at the Centre Pompidou), was hung improperly came from a photograph of the artist’s studio in taken in 1944, soon soon after he passed absent, the curator explained at the push conference. In the image, New York Town 1 can be seen on an easel with the tightly grouped yellow, blue, and black stripes at the major.

“Could it be that the orientation shown in the picture is the true one Mondrian experienced supposed?” the curator questioned. In accordance to Meyer-Büser the image was initial demonstrated at New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1945. There, too, the thick grouping of stripes was shown at the base of the work instead of at the prime. “Was it coincidence, was it oversight?” she said, introducing that probably it was flipped more than even though being unpacked at MoMA around 75 a long time ago. 

Meyer-Büser statements to have evidence outside of the photograph taken on Mondrian’s studio. She believes the artist would have labored from top to base, carefully layering the strips of tape over a person an additional, weaving them together in a certain way, a feat that would be substantially extra complicated if he labored from the base up.

Additional, at what is currently the major of the picture, the tape is harshly torn and does not attain the edge of the canvas—another indication that Mondrian probably worked from major to bottom. 

Irrespective, the work will be displayed at Mondrian. Evolution, which chronicles Mondrian’s stylistic development, the way it has been considering the fact that 1945, unclean ends up, thick grouping of horizontal tape at the bottom.

“If I flip the perform all-around, I threat destroying it,” Meyer-Büser stated, according to Monopol, and aside from “maybe there is no ideal or incorrect orientation at all?”

New York Town 1 is not the only time that the MoMA supposedly exhibited a do the job the mistaken way. In 1961, in the course of the museum’s exhibition of work by Henri Matisse, a stockbroker named Genevieve Habert observed the paper cut La Bateau was hung upside down. Neither the museum staff, the 116,000 visitors, nor the artist’s son Pierre had understood the blunder.

Following several visits, Habert acquired a catalogue and discovered she was correct, only to be scoffed at my museum employees. She then approached the New York Occasions, which reported on the topsy-turvy minimize out.

Soon right after publication, MoMA curators took a 2nd seem and in the end rehung the image the correct way. “Mrs. Habert must be specified a medal,” Pierre Matisse told the Situations.