It Would Have Been OK in Australia

Obvious once you look for it

I remember reading about a modern-art painting being hung upside down but didn't know that it was a Matisse:

In October and November of 1961, only one person among the 116,000 visitors to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition "The Last Works of Henri Matisse" noticed that one of the most elegant of the great artist’s late career cutouts, Le Bateau ("The Boat") was hanging upside down. The esteemed curators responsible for capsizing the sailboat, and even the artist's own son, the New York art dealer Pierre Matisse, had not noticed the error.

Le Bateau, executed in 1953, is comprised of paper cutouts forming a blue boat sailing on a windy day with clouds, and the water outlined with graceful, yet assertive, curving purple lines. The bottom half of the picture shows a stylized reflection of the boat and clouds...

However, a stockbroker named Genevieve Habert could not believe that Matisse would have arranged the picture in such a way as to give more detail to the reflection than the boat itself. An admirer of Matisse’s work, she visited the exhibition multiple times and on the third visit bought a catalogue, which, showing the picture correctly displayed, validated her assumption.

I was led down this path by a daily trivia question: a painting by what artist was once mistakenly hung upside-down at MOMA? The choices were Picasso, Matisse, Man Ray, and Jackson Pollock; I picked Pollock.

The 1961 mistake reminds me of this upside-down picture taken across the Foster City lagoon in 2013: