Art experts' keen eye can detect if a painting is authentic or fake. On rare occasions, however, they they have been fooled by original masterpieces.

Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian's "New York City 1" has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in the Big Apple since 1945, a year after he died. It was then transferred to Dusseldorf, Germany in 1980.

The painting, consisting of several lines in blue, red and yellow intersecting at right angles, has no signature, but the artist's name was inscribed on the back of the frame by the administrator of his estate, according to Agence France-Presse.

When the Kunstsammlung museum's curator, Susanne Meyer-Buser, prepared the art for exhibition last month, she discovered the painting was upside down, AFP reported.

"In a photo from 1944, I saw that the canvas was the other way around on an easel," Meyer-Buser told German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung.

In other words, Mondrian's "New York City 1" had been wrongly presented to the public for the past 77 years.

Abraham Bredius, curator of the Bredius museum in The Hague, Netherlands, bought in 1921 for exhibit an oil sketch from the 1640s titled "The Raising of the Cross" by famous Dutch master Rembrandt.

Art experts dismissed it as a "crude imitation" over the years because it was allegedly done by a Rembrandt follower and the brush strokes on the canvas were seemingly undetailed, AFP reported.
The sketch was put in a forgotten corner of the museum.

Last year, Jeroen Giltaij, former chief curator of old paintings at Rotterdam's Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, studied the sketch as part of his book titled "Big Book of Rembrandt Paintings" which features all 684 works of the Dutch master, according to AFP.

Giltaij observed the sketch's broad brush strokes which indicated Rembrandt's style. When art restorer Johanneke Verhave restored the sketch, he also found that its strokes matched the way Rembrandt handled his brush.

Results of a later analysis of the sketch by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum did not contradict Giltaij and Verhave's findings.

After 100 years of being an "imitation," "The Raising of the Cross" was finally recognized to be a work of Rembrandt himself.

WITH AFP