Piet Mondrian's 1941 masterpiece New York City I was hung inverted since 1945, including at the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf, where it's been since 1980. It's now in such poor condition that it's been deemed too risky to turn it around and the tape medium makes restoration a unique challenge.
A photograph of Mondrian's studio, taken a few days after the artist's death and published in American lifestyle magazine Town and Country in June 1944, also shows the same picture sitting on an easel the other way up. Meyer-Büser said it was likely that Mondrian worked by starting his intricate layering with a line right at the top of the frame and then worked his way down, which would also explain why some of the yellow lines stop a few millimetres short of the bottom edge. "Was it a mistake when someone removed the work from its box? Was someone being sloppy when the work was in transit?", the curator said. "It's impossible to say."
Alternative headline: "Mondrian Painting Takes On A Whole New Meaning."
