Upside-down art

"The work, Le Bateau by Matisse, hung upside down for 47 days in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Last Works of Henri Matisse. It was uprighted after Genevieve Habert, a Wall Street stockbroker, noticed the mistake. At first she notified a museum guard, who responded, "You don't know what's up and you don't know what's down and neither do we." After trying to get someone to listen, Habert gave up and called the New York Times about the mistake. The next day, after the director of exhibitions, Monroe Wheeler, was notified, the work was rehung properly. In response to questioning, the Times reported that Wheeler could only remember three other times when a similar event had occurred.

In 1936, Phantasy by Spencer Nichols hung upside down for 18 days at an exhibit in New Jersey. To cover the blunder, the New Jersey Museum Association responded that since the work was an abstraction it didn't matter which way it hung. They stated that they could only tell the work was upside down because his signature was "in the wrong corner." However, as Nichols pointed out, the work was not an abstraction but a seascape, which may have become abstract when it was turned upside down.

In 1963 art gallery officials in Manchester, England hung a work by Rauschenberg upside down. The error wasn't discovered until an artist visiting the gallery detected the mistake. It was then corrected only after officials looked at a catalogue of the show and noticed that alignment of the work in the catalogue was different from the way they had hung it.

In 1965, the painting Grass and Butterflies by van Gogh was hung upside down by the National Gallery in London.

Text credit HERE. Image credit HERE. The Matisse story has often been called an urban legend, but a confirmatory email from the MOMA is HERE.