I suppose it’s easy for me to say this having been prompted by the article, but it seems kinda obvious that it’s upside down. I’m not a Mondrian expert or even much of a casual fan, but having seen a few of his paintings in person before, this just looks wrong.
As with many optical illusion and aesthetic type things, my feeling about it is a general impression, not a deduction. But if I were asked to explain why I think it’s obvious, I’d point someone to the red and blue horizontal lines in the middle. Doesn’t it seem like the intended effect is like you’re looking horizontally level (or maybe slight upwards) through the girders of an unfinished building? And if so, doesn’t it seem like the blue is more distant and needs to be above the red?
I’m pretty surprised no one made a fuss about this a long time ago. I suspect it will turn out someone did. Someone has a social media photo saying it seems upside down, or some letter to a friend in 1960, or something like that.
If you have a strong impression that it’s upside down, or maybe a strong impression that it’s impossible to tell, I’d welcome a comment and explanation!
I do sometimes wonder if I see abstract art differently than others. For example, it seems to emerge to me upon long uninterrupted viewing (say, fifteen minutes) that some Rothko paintings have contrast patterns (in monochrome or in the color tone, I’m not sure) that evoke elements of faces. They trigger the facial processing center of my brain, I suppose. They are at different scales, almost fractal, and mostly vertical but some rotated. This makes them seem eerie, to have depth, to be a hazy view into a other world. It’s at an almost unconscious level. Because if I try to focus on the faces, they go away. It’s like it evokes an unconscious perceptual path that I’m forbidden to actually “know”.
This is unlike the experience I get from other similar amateur paintings that people might regard as being the same sort of art work. Those feel boring. His feel real, vibrant, almost kinetic. Emotional (maybe from the faces?). Like actual windows.
Is the face thing an optical illusion? Is it “in the data”? Do others see it too? I don’t know.