The Matisse that hung upside down for 47 days

In October 1961, New York's MoMA hung Le Bateau, a paper cut-out by Henri Matisse. Over 47 days, around 116,000 visitors filed past it. Not one said a word.

The alarm was raised by Genevieve Habert, a stockbroker who had seen it several times and could not stop puzzling over it. She compared the work with the catalogue and confirmed her suspicion: the picture was upside down.

Her complaint failed to impress a guard, so she alerted the press; the New York Times called the museum, and the work finally woke up the right way round.

The story has fed the eternal question about abstract art ever since: if nobody notices a work is inverted, does it matter? For Matisse it certainly did — in his cut-outs, the balance and fall of every shape were everything.