Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years | Hacker News Reader

Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years

theguardian.com

108 pointsnigerian198171 comments

The museum should take this moment to install a series of mirrors so that when you walk in you are exposed to all the different vantage points and can see it the right way, the wrong way and all other ways in between.

I bet that would get a lot of extra coverage in the news leading to extra money for the museum.

Also, they should advertise that one lucky person will be met by a dastardly villain who emerges from the house of mirrors and then murders them. That would also earn a lot of publicity and more money for the museum. When the villain emerges, they should say "I'm with the Pantone company, and you are looking at illegal colors, prepare to die."

Your last idea echoes the vibe of 2009's Rape Tunnel art installation: https://web.archive.org/web/20100105065446/http://www.artlur...

This is a fascinating, disturbing but thought-provoking article, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) turns out to be a hoax[1], presenting an image of a wind tunnel[2] as something much more sinister.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20091002111149/http://blogs.miam... [2] http://www.geversaircraft.com/wt/wt5x7.htm

I would like a website to randomly disply abstract paintings in different orientations and survey on which one feels the "rightest". For some reason the right side up Montrian in the article does look more correct in my eyes.

What makes you feel you hqve not been bullied by the art critics to believe this is "the right way"? Have you done a blind test? Does it mean you evaluated the right position while seeing the art piece for the first time jn your life? I doubt that.

> not been bullied by the art critics

Maybe I've just a man of discerning taste :-/. Jokes aside, I used to spend a lot of time in architecture and visual art studios. Sometimes flipping canvas or conceptual models around will make stuff from looking wrong to right. Get opinion from a group and it won't be 50/50 opinion, there would be some sort of consensus when something simply feels better. Perhaps it's just drinking big design koolaid, being "trained" / "bullied" by the system.

When I was in high school AV, one of the favorite projects we were involved in was a short doc/trailer for an abstract exhibit in a local museum.

We interviewed several people. The artistic director. Some people from our school who were painting a Sol LeWitt performance piece on the wall.

All in all pretty generic stuff. People describing what abstract art meant to them, how people could interact with it.

And then we interviewed the janitor (I was behind the camera observing).

He talked about how he hung paintings.

How there is a standard wire they put on the back of frames to ensure it was easy to hang frames level.

What the typical height of a hung artwork was. Based on how tall the average visitor was, and from how far away they would observe the painting.

It was the absolute highlight of that trailer.

My gripe with abstract art is a lot of artists settle on one gimmick. Mondrian? Space subdivided by lines. Pollock? Paint drips. It's the same as the Youtuber criticism: they have two years of ideas, then try to make a career out of it.

Perhaps it's just hard to come up with more.

But you do see the same effect on Twitter. Guy will be normal, then get popular for one tweet, and then spend the rest of his life trying to pander to that audience.

By pure coincidence, I just visited Kunstmuseum today in The Hague that has a large Mandria(a)n exhibit, so the following is fresh on the mind.

It took Mandria(a)n 30 years of professional painting to arrive at his spaces and lines. He was already in his 50s by that time, and it ended up being enormously popular and influential.

Artists have to eat too. Why fix something that isn't broken?

At the same museum they had a gallery of Josef Albers. He painted concentric squares of different colors for the last 26 years of his life.

* Mondriaan

A lot of bands barely have enough quality songs to fill a single side of a record, but they've managed to spread it out to a 4-album deal, a Best Of, and a comeback tour two decades later.

And they hate every day of it. I saw someone do a set, and when someone asked to hear one of his band's popular songs, he said "I have to play that 37 times this summer. I'm not playing it here."

This is almost entirely because of the art market and not because of the artist themselves. Few artists want to repeat the same thing repeatedly for decades.

I think artists are just happy if they can make a living. If it becomes lucrative to do the same kind of work repeatedly, I think most artist will jump at the chance because it beats working at an office 9-5 every day

This a common problem with abstract art. I have seen examples of rotations over various angles. I also have seen mirrored reproductions in catalogues and even the wrong work being reproduced in publications, especially when the works are from a series of similar works or when the final work differs but slightly from a study and a photograph of the study is used as a reproduction. Sometimes it is even not possible anymore to establish the original title of the work due all the confusion and mismatches. I know of two art museums in the Netherlands who both claim to posses the same art work from a series, while the works are clearly distinct. I think I know which one is incorrect, and I did point it out to them, but they simply refuse to correct the title.

The Emperor's new clothes have a similar problem. They're of course beautiful works of art, but they suffer from practical problems. For example: how do you find them in the morning?

It's too early in the morning, for this much pain. Please stop.

"It was recently discovered that Malevich's famous Black Square has been hanging upside down all this time" is a real joke. But then again, Malevich himself during his life actually hang his paintings differently at different expositions...

As a part-time artist who prints abstract digital art, I’ve had this happen to me - had my art hung upside-down from what I intended in a gallery show. It’s one reason I started signing the bottom right corner of the work, and framing with hanging wire well offset vertically from the center. But in at least one case I remember, I discussed the orientation with a buyer of the work and we agreed that the upside-down mistake actually looked better, and I endorsed them hanging it that way. Sometimes the orientation may be critical to the intent, and sometimes it’s not particularly relevant. It’s too bad we can’t ask Mondrian himself. I don’t know anything about his history or personality, anyone have any idea if orientation really mattered to him or whether he’s the kind of artist that would be open to someone preferring an upside-down version?

Plus I do think it's a compliment to the skills of the artist that her or his art is worth a good look even upside down; even if that's not the best way to view it.

Funnily enough, this parody news article from De Speld (like The Onion, but Dutch) describes the same thing! https://speld.nl/2013/04/16/schilderij-mondriaan-hing-jarenl...

Ah, now that it’s been turned the right way up I totally get it.

You may jest, but it does feel more "right" to me, although maybe that's bias from knowing it's the "right" way up.

When I opened the page I thought the right one looked "better" to me, but I didn't think it was the right one, I then saw the labels incorrect and correct.

I think the reason that the correct one looks correct is because that is busier on the top which, if you look at the tops first the busier more complicated one gives a feeling of more energy.

The article says it wasn't finished yet anyway.

The "right" one looks like a 3D lattice to me, the left one looks like a bunch of tape on a piece of cloth.

Yeah I wish they'd shown both and hidden which was correct and incorrect at first.

Also if it's adhesive it will fail eventually won't it, they'd need to stick it back anyway I guess flip it over then

I would've assumed the left one was the correct version, as it has more weight on the bottom.

For most humans, it feels natural to have negative space/light colours above (air, sky etc) and content/dark colours at the bottom (earth, gravel etc).

Having all the weight at the top of the piece makes it feel imbalanced - like a top-heavy object ready to topple over (which was maybe intentional, in this case)

Mondrian painted primarily trees, so I would expect the top to be heavier in most of them.

No, in 20nyears we discover colors should face the wall, real painting is blank canvas on other side :)

And in another 20 we'll realize the blank canvas isn't actually blank, you just have to look at it with a black light

I've often seen reproductions of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain hung on walls at 90 degrees to how the artist originally presented his "sculpture"... ;)

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573

This strikes me as interesting in terms of the question of how important artist intent is.

It seems to me that for many pieces of abstract art it doesn't really matter which side the artist intended to be the top. It might matter if the orientation has an impact on the work's message (e.g. if the author intended abstract shapes at the top to in some way represent Heaven while those on the bottom represent earth). However, I'd suggest that "this is what the artist intended" is not on it's own enough to make the orientation important.

For written works we often hear that analysis doesn't need to depend on the author's intent. Why shouldn't that also hold true for visual art?

> Why shouldn't that also hold true for visual art?

To answer that, we'd have to say more about why the meaning of a written work doesn't depend on the author's intent than "we often hear."

I'd say that the author's intent is only relevant to the question of what the author intended their work to mean. I don't see any reason it would be relevant to any other insights or significance that a reader gains from the text.

It's similar to how the fact that the cat command was intended to be used to concatenate files is irrelevant to it's more common use to dump a file to stdout.

The analysis of visual art does not depend on the authors intent any more than for written work. But changing the orientation of a piece would better be compared to changing the order of the words than analyzing the work. Hanging it upside down changes the work, not your analysis of it.

A restorer would certainly be able to correct the loose-tape problem. I'm shocked the curator is content to leave it in the compromised state.

Watch Baumgartner Restoration to see examples of extreme restoration.

Baumgartner does "value" restoration. He gets a lot of criticism which I think is unfounded (his way of working is perfectly appropriate for the pieces he's working on), but he's far from the state of the art you see at the Met, Louvre or British Museum.

What sort of criticisms does he get? Also, any examples of the state of the art art restoration?

From previous searching on this topic, I think the main criticism is that he implies he's a conservator but he's actually a restorer. There's a big Reddit thread here[1] which covers some of the differences.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtConservation/comments/jnda7z/cri...

He can restore paint peeling from glass and falling into the bottom of the frame, to near-original condition. He can take skinned paintings and return them to something like they were intended to present.

He can take almost-destroyed objects and return them to curatable, displayable art with the original artist's intention preserved (as well as the damage permits).

I'm sure folks can backseat-drive anything, but he makes it perfectly clear what his intentions are and what the customer's expectations are. And then he does that.

Anyway I learned a lot from his demonstrations.

Love that channel!

I swear this was an episode of Arthur...

I was thinking of the scene in "The 'burbs" when Bruce Dern keeps turning the art over trying to figure it out.

It was, the episode even had it as a Mondrian.

Yes! It was an episode from season 2! https://arthur.fandom.com/wiki/Binky_Barnes,_Art_Expert

So they can't turn it the right way up, because M. Mondrian chose to make the thing out of sticky-tape, and the stickiness has dried up over the years.

I guess there's a reason the masters made their own paint, out of linseed oil and pigments.

What a legacy... If you don't know what's up and what's down, may be it doesn't worth to know it.

I would be more expecting the value to double at the next auction now that people can see it as it was supposed to be seen

How could they make such a mistake, it is obvious which one is the correct one.

Next time someone invites me to a modern art gallery, I'm going to stare at one of the paintings for a couple minutes then say, "You know, I think this one is upside down.."

Is this a joke, the correct and incorrect don’t change at all on sliding.

It changes for me on Firefox for Android.

I think I shall never be aesthetically inclined enough to know what this painting means, it doesn't mean anything more to me no matter which side is right side up. I really wish I could see it, but I never do. I (think) I can see it when I see other abstract stuff that at least has a "form" that exists in nature but stuff like this I just don't get it and I wish that I could.

l°l

Theory: modern art was promoted by the wealthy art world because it eliminates the ability of the artist to engage in potentially threatening or disturbing social or political commentary.

Case example (relevant to our current world) - Henri Rousseau's War (1984 - oops, 1894), depicting a girl/woman riding a horse across a field of bodies with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. There's nothing signifying nobility and glory; it's mostly madness and lunacy. It has historical significance, as wars had ravaged Europe for centuries and the 20th century, with industrialized warfare on a new scale, was about to break new records for battlefield savagery and violence against civilian populations.

https://www.henrirousseau.net/war.jsp

What would be the 'modern art' version of 'War'?

Guernica springs to mind.

I wouldn't call Guernica modern art, as there's certainly not much doubt as to which end goes up.

"Modern Art" does not mean "abstract art" or even "today's art." Picasso is absolutely one of the main names in the modern art movement. "Abstract art" is also not the same as "contemporary art" and is much more associated with the middle of the 20th century than art produced in the last several decades.

I agree. But some people disagree rather vigourously; they believe that "modern" means the same as "contemporary". I believe that modern art is a series of movements that began mid-19thC, and ended in about 1960, to be replaced initially by pop art, and later by "contemporary art", like Unmade Bed and Pile Of Bricks.

Even art described as "abstract" isn't always abstract. For example, I think Jack The Dripper's paintings are often figurative, although they're normally referred to as abstract.

I get a little annoyed by the audacity of an art movement to declare themselves the "modern" art movement. Clearly this is short-sighted and will only cause confusion in 50 years when something else comes along.

Art movements tend not to be named by the people making the art. Instead they are usually named by artists, art historians, curators, and critics with the power of hindsight.

...and art dealers.

But it's not just "modern". How arrogant is it to call yourself "futurist"? (and the futurists did explicitly choose that name).

Is the term "dada" little more than a sharp elbow in the ribs of fancy-named art movements?

Modern art was promoted by the CIA.

Don't take my word for it: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...

Or more specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Paid_the_Piper%3F

1984 is modern. That painting is from 1894.

Thanks, fixed

Lissitzky's "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"?[1]

You miss the fact that despite the fact painters were very politically active before WW2, it made zero difference to the horrors that happened afterwards (and many artists, such as the futurists, were even complicit, or, like the Russian avant-garde, got purged). Also, photography killed realism in painting. Painting turned its eye inwards, trying to express inner feelings, rather than realistic things.

(We also have a biased view because we only remember masterpieces from older times. For one Henri Rousseau, there were thousands of dull portraits of patrons and bland nature mortes)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_the_Whites_with_the_Red...

> Theory: modern art was promoted by the wealthy [...] because it eliminates the ability of the artist to engage in potentially threatening or disturbing social or political commentary.

At the least, abstract expression was promoted in Europe in order to fight communism. It was "freer" than socialist realism (Stalin felt the same way about art as Hitler), and as you said, has no content.

edit: abstract expression is literally purely authoritarian art. Its value fully lies in the arbitrary statements that authorities make about it. I'd love to see abstract expressionist art fans tested on written art critiques: all they would have to do is read the critique, and guess whether the person who wrote it had ever seen the piece being critiqued. No chance it would be more than a coinflip.

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