A influential artwork hung upside down at two different museums for 75 years risks getting disintegrated if it is displayed the right way up now, The Guardian reported, quoting an art historian.
The piece, called New York City I, belongs to Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian. It comprises criss-crossing colourful adhesive tapes.
The work was first displayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1945. From there it moved to the art collection of Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia state.
Curator Susanne Meyer-Büser realised the art piece was in the wrong position while conducting research on its creator earlier this year.
She pointed out that the grid in the painting should be seen thickening at the top instead of the bottom.
“Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious. I am 100% certain the picture is the wrong way around," she told The Guardian.
Her argument is substantiated through a photo of the artwork at Mondrian's studio.
But the painting will have to remain the upside-down position to stay intact.
“The adhesive tapes are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” Meyer-Büser said. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story.”
Mondrian created several "New York City" paintings from 1941 and 1942, which were seen as breaking from his strict concept of Gestalt --a term describing the ability to recognise patterns.
"A lively, dynamic rhythm of colored, red, blue and yellow stripes took the place of the radically reduced pictorial language," said the art gallery where his work is displayed now.
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