A seascape, Le Bateau, by Henri Matisse, was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and left that way for a month and a half.
116,000 viewers strolled past the upside-down Matisse before it was rehung correctly.
I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often. It probably does . . . it just passes unremarked if the artist isn’t as famous as Matisse. I’ve seen paintings in some of our country’s finest museums consisting of nothing but a square canvas painted a single color. Who’s to say how many times they’ve been accidentally hung upside-down or sideways?
Try this next time you’re at an art museum. Check out the “modern” or “abstract” art and ask yourself for each piece, “Could this be hung upside down without anyone noticing the difference?” I don’t mean that the painting would look exactly the same upside down, I mean it would make as much sense upside down.
You couldn’t hang a still life, for example, upside down. It would be filled with objects defying the law of gravity. But why couldn’t you hang a Jackson Pollock upside down?
