A painting by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian It hung upside down in prestigious museums for 77 years, museum officials discovered this week Kunstsammlung in the German city of Düsseldorf, where it is currently exhibited.

This institution inaugurated this Saturday a major retrospective of the artist, with the work “New York 1“, from 1941, as the main piece.

However, that painting has been exposed for decades with its bottom up, the museum said this week.

“In a photo from 1944, I saw that the canvas was (positioned) upside down on the easel. This intrigued me,” he said. Susanne Meyer-Busercurator of the exhibition, in an interview with the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The painting, made up of several red, yellow and blue strokes that intersect at right angles, was exhibited “a year later”, in the wrong direction, in the mom from New York, he added. And when the Düsseldorf museum received the painting in 1980, he hung it the same way.

An error that could be caused by “the painting has no signature”the Commissioner observed.

Therefore, its meaning would have been determined by the “name of the painter, written on the back of the painting by the estate administrator” when Mondrian died in 1944.

Piet Mondrian, born in 1872, is one of the leading figures of the Dutch movement “De Stijl ” (“The Style”), known for its horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors.

In 1940 the painter went to New York and was inspired by the skyscrapers of that city to create his paintings.

He is known all over the world for his canvases “Victory Boogie Woogie”, considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century.