For 77 years, a Piet Mondrian painting was hanging upside down

A curator at the German museum claims that a Piet Mondrian abstract artwork has been hanging upside down for 77 years.

On Saturday, a major retrospective of the avant-garde artist’s work opened at the Kunstsammlung museum in Düsseldorf. The 1941 painting ‘New York City 1’ is one of the pieces on show.

The curator of the exhibit, Susanne Meyer-Buser, discovered as she was preparing for the presentation that the picture had been shown to the public in a different way than it may have been intended.

‘In a photo from 1944, I saw that the canvas was the other way around on an easel. It intrigued me,’ Meyer-Buser told the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The curator claims that the painting, which was composed of several lines in blue, red, and yellow that intersected at right angles, was later displayed wrongly at MoMA in New York.

It was relocated to a museum in Düsseldorf in 1980, where a comparable exhibit was built.

The error might have occurred because ‘the painting doesn’t have a signature,’ claims Meyer-Buser.

The decision to show the work in the manner it has been for many years was undoubtedly influenced by the artist’s name being put on the back of the frame by the executor of the (artist’s estate) when Mondrian passed away in 1944.