A Mondrian at Düsseldorf Has Been Upside Down Since 1945

Piet Mondrian made New York City I in 1941 from strips of colored adhesive tape laid directly on canvas. He died in February 1944 without finishing it, and crucially, without signing it. The unsigned, taped, unfinished canvas first surfaced publicly in 1945, and from that day on it has been displayed with the dense cluster of tape lines at the bottom.

That is wrong. In October 2022, Susanne Meyer-Büser, curator of Mondrian: Evolution at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, was preparing the show when she found a photograph in a June 1944 issue of Town and Country. The photo shows the painting on an easel in Mondrian's studio. The dense lines are at the top, thinning toward the bottom — like a Manhattan skyline read downward toward the street. A companion work, New York City, painted a year earlier and hung at the Centre Pompidou, follows the same logic.

The museum is leaving it inverted. The tape, after eighty years, has gone brittle; some pieces are, in the conservator's phrase, hanging by a thread. Flipping the canvas now would risk shedding pieces of the painting on the floor. So New York City I stays upside down, with a wall label that explains why.

This is a small disaster of art history, and a quiet one. Three generations of MoMA visitors, then Pompidou loans, then Düsseldorf, all looked at a Mondrian without knowing they were reading it the wrong way. The denser sky was always at the top.