The Case of the Upside-Down Rothko

An innocent young American’s comeuppance at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam

By Ian Strasfogel

An upside-down Rothko appeared before my astonished eyes at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1961. Had one of Europe’s most prestigious bastions of 20th-century art actually displayed one of Rothko’s great paintings incorrectly? Had I imagined it? Was I right to have pointed it out to the museum authorities, or should I have kept quiet? Now, decades later, the time has finally come for me to resolve this mystery.

When I graduated from Harvard earlier that year, my career path was clear. I’d become a curator or, better yet, a museum director. I’d already been accepted with a full scholarship for graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. But first I was going off to Europe on a Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellowship “to pursue purposeful travel in Europe”. (I was pretty proud that I’d gotten one; back then, Harvard awarded only two each year.)

England was my first stop. After hopscotching from one cathedral town to another, I settled down in London for some serious museum study at the National Gallery, the Tate, the V&A, the British Museum, the Wallace, the Courtauld, et cetera and so forth, before discovering something entirely different and far more exciting: the newly opened Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End—which at that time was presenting Mark Rothko’s first exhibition in Great Britain.

Mark Rothko! I’d heard his name but never seen his actual work. I was floored. This was my art, the art of our time—marvelous, luminous abstraction. Large rectangles of supersaturated color, ranging from pale pistachio to deepest maroon, blossomed across overscale vertical canvases. I was enthralled.

When I arrived in Amsterdam later that fall, the Stedelijk Museum was also presenting a Rothko survey. Great. I’d have another chance to luxuriate in his glorious paintings.

The show felt like a reunion with old friends. Some of the canvases from London were on display, along with many I’d never seen before. Rothko’s work always feels solid and balanced, with nothing awry or askew. Each pictorial element serves as a building block for the next, producing a unified image. I wandered from one to another, lost in the paintings’ somber majesty.

Suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks. One of the works stood apart from the rest—and not in a good way. It was hung upside down.

How could that be? Museums never make that sort of gaffe. Convinced that I must be wrong, I stepped in closer and studied the work intently. It had to be a figment of my (often overactive) imagination.

But it wasn’t. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was hung the wrong way ’round.

Scandal, catastrophe! Action must be taken; I must save the museum from disaster! I went up to a guard and told him in my most authoritative voice that I needed to see a curator, fast; something was terribly wrong. The poor man was startled, to say the least. It’s not every day that a visitor, in this case a sloppily dressed kid of 21, makes that sort of request.

The guard scurried away. Within a few minutes, a young man in suit and tie materialized, looking even more perplexed than the guard.

“I’ve been told there’s some sort of problem?”

“Yes, there most certainly is,” I said and plunged right in. I told him the whole story, how I’d seen many of the works in London, knew and loved them well, but one of them was upside down.

“I wanted to inform you promptly,” I added sweetly, “so you could rehang it.”

Curiously (to me, at least), the young man seemed irritated.

“Rehang it?” I was saving him from scandal. Why was he scowling?

“Yes, of course,” I continued, the star art-history student gleefully showing off. “Don’t you see? The large, dark rectangle is on top, even though in every other picture it’s on the bottom—a pedestal on which the composition rests. That’s why the piece feels so heavy.” I looked back at the curator to see if he agreed, but his face was an icy mask.

“No,” he said finally, “this is the way it goes.”

His hostility perplexed me. I was saving him and his institution from horrible embarrassment.

“But why?” I persisted. “The large rectangle on top crushes the rest of the picture.”

His eyes narrowed into slits. “No, sorry; we followed Mr. Rothko’s precise instructions. You can’t possibly be right.”

“But look, right here,” I insisted, pointing to a passage in the middle of the work, “the paint is dripping up. That never happens with Rothko.”

As I delivered the coup de grace, I surged with self-confidence. He’d finally see the light. I had visions of the director of the Stedelijk inviting me to his office, thanking me profusely, and offering me a prestigious job.

Instead, my antagonist stormed out of the gallery.

His sudden disappearance startled me. He didn’t thank me. He didn’t even say goodbye.

Yes, I was naive back then, a true hothouse flower, overprotected by well-meaning parents from grim reality. I found it difficult to imagine that anyone could ever be mean or bloody-minded. Anne Frank had famously written, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” I was rather like her—but on steroids.

Oddly enough, it never once occurred to me that I might be wrong. That must have been the Harvard in me. We grads were trained to trust—no, savor—our instincts; let the pieces fall where they may. The pieces were scattered all over the floor of the Stedelijk Museum on that autumn day in 1961.

It’s now my task to reassemble them. Thanks to the astonishingly wide reach of the internet, I was able to find a copy of the catalog of the Amsterdam exhibit. It didn’t seem promising at first, simply offering a bare-bones listing of works exhibited and a few black-and-white reproductions, which submerged Rothko’s magic in a grayish gloom.

The opening acknowledgments were more helpful. It turned out that the Stedelijk show had little to do with the London exhibition. There was some overlap, but the Dutch organizers made no mention anywhere of British collaborators. Instead, they cited the Museum of Modern Art in New York as the show’s primary source, with the well-known critics and Rothko experts Peter Selz and Robert Goldwater serving as curators.

This seemed ominous. If the works mainly came from MoMA, under the eyes of its exceptional staff, they surely came carefully packed and clearly marked. Nonetheless, there still was a chance that the museum’s crew screwed up once the paintings were unloaded. James E.B. Breslin’s exhaustive biography makes clear that while Rothko did install the paintings in London, he didn’t travel to Amsterdam. More sleuthing was required.

I turned to the definitive critical catalog, David Anfam’s Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas (Yale University Press, 1998), which reproduced Rothko’s entire output in color and provides its full ownership and exhibition history. This extraordinary volume made it easy for me to find the works that were shown in both London and Amsterdam.

As I opened the page to Rothko’s magistral Brown on Blue from 1953, Anfam catalog number 477, I felt a jolt of recognition. That was the painting. No doubt about it. But it was reproduced exactly as it had been exhibited in Amsterdam! My notion that Rothko always placed large, dark shapes at the base of his compositions to serve as a kind of pedestal was obviously incorrect. In Brown on Blue, the work’s largest mass, a deep, foreboding brown, occupies the entire upper half of the canvas. As for the errant drips, well, a few passages in the middle of the painting do seem to show some upward movement.

But that’s irrelevant. Anfam points out that in this picture, as in most from this period, Rothko painted his name in big block letters in the upper corner on the reverse of the canvas. You’d have to be a blithering idiot to hang it wrong way round.

In short, the Stedelijk had displayed the work properly, and I’d acted like a fool.

Of course, my antagonist, the stubbornly defensive young man, hardly proved himself a master of public relations. His dogged resistance prolonged a schoolboy scuffle between two tender (and insecure) male egos.

I wonder what would have happened if they’d sent a female curator ….

Ian Strasfogel is an author, opera director, and impresario who has staged over a hundred productions of opera and music theater in European and American opera houses and music festivals. His comic novel, Operaland, and his biography of his father, Ignace Strasfogel: The Rediscovery of a Musical Wunderkind, were both published in 2021.

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