It may seem strange, but it has happened that some paintings even by very important authors (such as Henri Matisse or Piet Mondrian) were exposed “upside down”. We don’t think about it often, but for abstract works of art, or when the image does not represent an easily recognizable subject (and does not have a signature), understanding the correct orientation of the painting may not be trivial even for experts. This is why it has happened many times in history that the paintings were hung upside down.
It had caused quite a stir a few years ago in 2022the news of the painting of Piet Mondrian, famous Dutch artist, hanging backwards: themistake it had been repeated from multiple museums, over the course of 75 years old. The 1941 painting is a complex intertwined lattice of titled red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tape New York City I: first exhibited at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York in 1945, but for forty years it has been in the North Rhine-Westphalian art collection in Düsseldorf. Here the painting was hung in such a way that it had thicker lines at the bottom, suggesting a very simplified version of one skyline. But when the curator Susanne Meyer-Büser As she began researching a new exhibition, she realized the painting should be upside down: “The thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky,” Meyer-Büser told the Guardian. “Once I pointed this out to the other curators, we realized it was obvious. I’m 100% sure the image is backwards.”
An embarrassing misunderstanding, but certainly not the first of its kind: a painting by Henri Matisse abstract and minimal of a sailing boat and its reflection (there are only a few outlines and shapes). More than a month after its display in 1961, a Wall Street stockbroker became convinced on his third visit that the work must have been flipped. The exhibition catalog confirmed his suspicions, and the story made it to the New York Times.
And then it happened again with works by Dalì, Pollock, Rothko. Someone will say “of course, if they are all abstract works it is not trivial to decide what is above and below”: and instead it also happened with a landscape. It was a Breton village under the snow Paul Gauguin. The 1903 work (now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris) was auctioned in Tahiti (where the artist died) with the title Niagara Falls. Could it be because they had never seen snow on the Caribbean island?
So, can we say we have learned our lesson? Not really, because only last year another mistake of the same type was made: in 2023 the Foundation Hilma af Klint had to admit that one of the Swedish artist’s eponymous abstract canvases may have been hanging upside down for decades. Among the visitors, one person noticed something strange about the artwork The Swan n. 14 exhibited for a few months at the Tate Modern in London. Comparing this painting with other works from the “Black Swan” series, also by the artist, he saw that the central triangle was inverted, as was the color scheme, which also changed the entire meaning of the work (since these elements were used by the artist to indicate specific “spiritual energies”): he was right.
