North Rhine-Westphalia art collection
News from the NOS•
One of the paintings by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is decades old hung upside down in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum in Düsseldorf. This was revealed by the German museum in a press conference on the occasion of the inauguration of an exhibition in honor of Mondrian’s 150th birthday. The museum added the painting to its collection in 1980.
Curator Susanne Meyer-Büser believes there are several reasons to believe that the painting is suspended incorrectly.
The painting is made up of several horizontal and vertical colored stripes. In a photo taken in his studio shortly after Mondrian’s death in 1944, the artwork can be seen on an easel. The closest stripes are at the top of the painting.
This is also the case with an almost identical painting that hangs in the Center Pompidou in Paris.
In the German museum, the painting was rotated 180 degrees, so that the closest strips are at the bottom. The museum has no plans to deliver the artwork now that the flaw has been discovered.
Watch the trailer for the exhibition where the painting can be seen here:
