Al-Marsad Newspaper – Agencies: Officials from a museum in the German city of Dusseldorf discovered that a painting exhibited at the site by Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian had been hung the wrong way 77 years ago.
A major retrospective of the Dutch painter was launched Saturday at the Kunsthalleung Museum, including the “New York City 1” exhibition, completed in 1941.
But the museum revealed this week that the painting has been hanging upside down at the site for decades.
“In a photo from 1944, I saw that the painting was hanging in the opposite direction,” exhibition curator Susanne Meyer-Busser told the German newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, according to AFP.
The painting, made up of red, yellow and blue lines that intersect at right angles, was then exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York “the following year,” erroneously, according to Meyer Poser.
When it was sent to the German Museum in Düsseldorf in 1980, the painting was rearranged in the same way.
According to Mayer Bosser, the mistake could be due to the fact that “the painting has no signature,” according to AFP.
The direction of his exhibition was therefore determined in reference to the “name of the artist engraved on the back of the frame by the benefactor”, at the time of Mondrian’s death in 1944.
