The Upside Down Mondrian and Modern Views on Abstraction

A photo of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s studio, published in a 1944 issue of the magazine Town and Country, featured a work in progress of the then recently-deceased artist. The piece, titled New York City I, is recognizable as a Mondrian from the signature bright yellow, red, blue, and black lines that create a grid pattern on the canvas. As understood from the title, this grid represents an abstracted Manhattan skyline. Today, the piece, which hangs in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum in Düsseldorf, Germany, has remained identical to the one seen in the photo, save for one important distinction: it is upside down. 

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The photo was sent to the museum last year by Francesco Visalli, an Italian artist who has been researching Mondrian’s work. “Whenever I look at this work, I always have the distinct feeling that it needs to be rotated 180 degrees,” Visalli wrote in an email attached with the photo, according to The New York Times’ Julia Jacobs. “I realize that for decades it has been observed and published with the same orientation, yet this feeling remains pressing.” Since 1945, the year after Mondrian’s death, the piece has hung in museums with the denser lines of colorful adhesive tape at the bottom of the canvas; for Visalli, they should be at the top.

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Visalli persuaded museum curators at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen to reexamine the orientation of the painting, and consider the possibility that the piece may have been hanging upside down, unnoticed, for over 75 years. 

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“The thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky,” agreed Susanne Meyer-Büser, curator at the Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum, according to The Guardian’s Philip Oltermann. “I am 100% certain the picture is the wrong way around.” In the museum catalog prepared for the Mondrian exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Meyer-Büser cites Mondrian’s New York City, his only painting in a series of similar works (including New York City I) that feature the Manhattan skyline: the painting, on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is hung so that the closely overlapping lines are closer to the top. She argues that Mondrian’s interpretation of the New York City skyline was constant, and he meant for the denser lines to be at the top of his works. 

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As New York City I is unfinished and without a signature, Meyer-Büser has also attempted to break down the artist’s process in order to determine its correct orientation. After moving to New York from war-torn Europe, Mondrian began experimenting with colorful tape, which allowed him to rearrange his designs on the canvas before completing a piece. Assuming that he started attaching the tape at the top of the canvas, letting it roll downwards following the law of gravity, the gaps that can be seen near the top edge of the piece should be at the bottom, where the artist would have ripped the tape before moving to a new stripe. Meyer-Büser concludes that “the painting has indeed been hanging upside down ever since it was first exhibited in 1945.”

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However, art experts across the globe have made it clear that Meyer-Büser’s conclusion is not definitive. Mondrian was known to flip his pieces while working on them, and since New York City I is a work in progress, there is no way of knowing the artist’s intentions for the final composition. The authority of the photo from Town and Country has also been questioned. Harry Cooper, a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, who has helped set up two Mondrian exhibitions, posits that someone other than Mondrian may have, after his death, placed the painting in the easel that appears in the photo. This is after a different painting, Victory Boogie Woogie, appears in that same easel in Mondrian’s studio around the same time. 

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Despite the uncertainty regarding the current orientation of the painting, the Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum has stated that it does not intend to rotate the piece, as it has become too fragile to handle.

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Now aware of the incertitude regarding the perspective from which Mondrian’s New York City I ought to be viewed, one is left to reconcile the certainty of what one sees with the uncertainty of what one knows. Has the contemporary viewer’s perspective of the work changed because of the conflicting ideas that have circulated the media in the last year? Or has one always seen New York City I simply as a colorful grid pattern, a variation of an image by Mondrian that has come to symbolize the abstract movement? At a time when people are busier than ever, surface is just as important as substance. If all the piece means to today’s viewer is colorful abstraction, an icon rather than an image, has the possibility of the canvas hanging upside down changed anything? Ultimately, after all the discussions and debates, might the modern viewer’s perspective of the upside down Mondrian still be the same?