The work, created not long after the 1967 Six-Day War, was never exhibited during Heller’s lifetime—he died in 2018. The print, along with numerous other works, was found tucked in a drawer at his home in Kibbutz Nirim, a community along the border with Gaza, where he lived for most of his life. At the time of the work’s making, Israel had just seized control of the Palestinian territory from Egypt, before ultimately withdrawing in 2005. That piece, along with eight others, is now being exhibited for the first time in Kibbutz Sometimes, a solo exhibition open at the Mishkan Museum, an art museum in northern Israel.

“Heller returns from reserve duty and writes a text—in real time, which I think is super radical,” Avi Lubin, the museum’s chief curator, and the curator of the Israel Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, told ARTnews. “This is a work from 1968 but I’m convinced he would say the same thing today, that despite what happened and despite the horrors of October 7 and despite everything Hamas did and everything Israel is doing in Gaza—we must find the way to make peace and talk.”

The exhibition is the second in a series that Lubin has devoted to artworks from towns along the Gaza-Israel border that survived the October 7 attack by Hamas. The curator, who has been a frequent figure at protests in Israel calling for a ceasefire and hostage deal, links the series to the historic mission of the Mishkan, which began in 1937 with the goal of salvaging European Jewish art and culture at risk of destruction. In the weeks after the attack, Lubin considered what became of the works by several artists active in the kibbutzim and towns that were targeted that day, which the museum considers part of its broader goal to “preserve the works of Jewish artists from communities that no longer exist,” per the Heller show’s description.

Other Israeli museums have also addressed this question, with Jerusalem’s Israel Museum installing a shrapnel and bullet-damaged landscape painting by Be’eri-based artist, Ziva Jelin, in November. A solo exhibition of photographic still-lifes by Osnat Ben Dov was on view at the time of the attack at Be’eri Gallery, an art gallery incinerated during the Hamas attack,  and was restaged at the Janco Dada Museum in December.

Lubin waited until April, when it was permittable to go to Nirim, to select works from Heller’s estate, noting when he was there that a structure close to Heller’s storage had previously been hit by a rocket. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker who established an etching workshop in Nirim’s defunct cowshed, Heller was best known for socialist and autobiographical works, like those that explored his separation from his parents due to the Holocaust.

(Heller was born in 1937 in Bucharest; his parents emigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in 1939 and he was unable to join them until 1949).

In the Mishkan exhibition, however, Lubin felt it was critical to show another side of Heller.

“It was important to me to put his political work at the forefront,” said Lubin. “He was a man who lived until 2018 and, despite years of war and rockets and conflict, he kept working towards dialogue.”

Like many who lived in kibbutzim along the Gaza border, Heller had deep political commitments, both as a Marxist and as one devoted to peace with Palestinians. (It is a bitter irony for Israelis that the communities attacked in October were typically home to some of the country’s most devoted peace activists.)

Kibbutz Sometimes highlights Heller’s seldom-exhibited works. A 2010-2011 etching titled Rabuba, of a bird perched on the trunk of a potted tree,comes from Heller’s late Tel Gamma series. Made after Israel’s 2009 war against Hamas, it recounts the tragic story of Majda Abu Hajaj and her mother Raya Salama Abu Hajaj, two Palestinian women fatally shot in an incident with the Israel Defense Forces. (While an investigation was inconclusive, witnesses at the time said the women were shot by IDF soldiers while carrying a white flag and fleeing fighting.)

Heller often used baskets and birds as motifs for works about his own life.

“He connected his biography with their biography and his images with the images of Tel Gamma,” Lubin said, explaining how Heller intermingled his personal visual language with individual stories from Gaza to highlight their shared humanity.

Another work, a print titled The Green Line, was made in 1972, exhibited a year later, and never since. For those who don’t live near a border, it can be an abstract concept. Heller, confronted by the border every day of his life, rendered it unflinchingly real. In the work, a rough swathe of emerald green hangs beneath a wire fence, referencing the demarcation line defined in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbors. For Heller, the line represented an omnipresent literal barrier that prevents dialogue between two peoples.

Shortly before his death, Heller met Haran Kislev, an emerging artist living in nearby Kibbutz Be’eri who was also creating images of the border. The two met at the opening for The Road to El Bureij, a 2017-2018 exhibition at Be’eri Gallery showing Kislev’s abstracted landscape paintings depicting a path between Be’eri and the El Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. For over a decade, Kislev has painted the landscape around Be’eri as, in his artist statement, “in the shadow of an armed struggle, concrete roadblocks near the border and the constant presence of armed forces.”

“Haran peers outwards and documents the blocked road, the changing light, atmosphere, and landscape, capturing the political interruption and estrangement,” artist Etti Abergel wrote in that exhibition’s catalogue. “The intense beauty erupting from his paintings stresses the horror and anxiety, the missed opportunities, the obstructed feeling of existing between the studio and reality, between the painting and the geographical location, between a utopia and its downfall.”

For Kislev, who carries on Heller’s legacy of engaging with the border, the series has taken on new meaning since October 7. Kislev was born and raised in Kibbutz Be’eri and was there with his wife and two children during the attack.

“That’s where they broke into the kibbutz from,” reflected Kislev. “There was always this fear in the paintings, of ‘what would happen if? If there was a very, very big catastrophe. And what does it mean to live there?’ This bubbling of the earth is something that preoccupied me for many, many years.” Since October 7, Kislev and his family have been displaced to a kibbutz in central Israel and he moved his work to a temporary studio in Tel Aviv; while repairs and reconstruction of Kibbutz Be’eri are underway, resettlement is currently slated for sometime in 2025.

Kislev’s work, in many ways, prompted the Mishkan’s ongoing series showing works that survived the attack. His last series produced in his Be’eri studio formed the basis of the first exhibition, Kibbutz Anxiety, which opened in December. It included nine works that the artist evacuated in a complex multi-trip process that involved military permits and the aid of a nonprofit organization—since regular movers weren’t allowed in the area—all during a period of frequent rocket attacks from Gaza. The exhibition, ironically, saved the artworks.

“A week after we removed [the paintings] a rocket or something fell in the area and the roof above where the works had been kept was completely destroyed,” Kislev said. “If we hadn’t done the exhibition, it all would have been destroyed.”

Lubin is continuing to work on the exhibition series, but at a wartime pace.

“Everything is very sensitive and I’m trying to do this very slowly together with the artists and their families, in order to understand what their needs are,” Lubin said. “I thought about one person and understood that this person is in a difficult emotional state, and that it’s better to wait at the moment.”

Returning to Heller’s Remaining Words, the artwork gracing the invitation to the opening of Kibbutz Sometimes, Lubin is unsure how audiences will respond to this print and the other artworks in the show.

“I think there are two components to our responsibility as a museum. One is to express solidarity and promote healing and extend a hand,” Lubin said, recounting how the museum immediately began hosting daily activities and workshops for the many displaced families in the area. In October alone, the museum hosted roughly 5,000 displaced Israeli children.

“In parallel, as a museum, we can’t only be a place of refuge and healing. We must also ask questions and challenge ideas. And part of our role, in this moment, is to not forget the questions: Where are we going, how do we move forward, and what is our future here?”

And so just a few years after Breton defined Surrealism, staking his claim in conceptual ground that it was “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought,” women actively participated. They showed their paintings, photographs, collages, assemblages, garments, and sculptures in group Surrealist exhibitions and had their own solo shows, with catalog introductions written by Surrealists in their circle.

Between 1924, when Breton released the first Surrealist Manifesto, and 1947, when a major exhibition at Galerie Maeght celebrated the postwar return of Surrealism to Paris, the “first generation” of Surrealists included numerous women, many more than the 15 included here. Each had her own complex relationship with the movement.

“The diversity of experience and attitude on the part of women artists active in Surrealism has proved both an obstacle and a challenge,” wrote art historian Whitney Chadwick in her groundbreaking 1985 text Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. “In the end, I came to view such diversity as a tribute to these women, an affirmation of their strength as individuals and a mark of their commitment to a form of creative expression in which personal reality dominates.”

Some of the artists profiled below proudly carried the label, and others emphatically denied being Surrealists. But in a sense, isn’t it a Surrealist trait par excellence to defy being squeezed neatly into a box?

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Audrey Flack

The ‘drip technique’ scarf around Flack/Mary’s neck may not strike you as matching the cherub-filled frame, but she’d likely tell you to deal with it. As is often her wont, she braids together flyaway strands of her ars longa practice. “Her work has evolved by saturating the canvas with ideas, myths, styles, color, and humor,” says Monica Ramirez-Montagut, executive director of the Parrish Art Museum. “It is like each painting is a survey of her career on its own.”

Flack has always experimented with self-portraiture and, among other things, is known for fusing the personal with the art historical and the present with the past. She dubs her recent work (including this self-portrait) her “Post-Pop Baroque” period, in which she appropriates images of pop-cultural figures like Elizabeth Taylor and Superman, and places them in opulent surrounds.

Together with 15 other Post-Pop Baroque paintings, Self-Portrait with Flaming Heart will be on view this month in “Audrey Flack: With Darkness Comes Stars,” a one-person show at Hollis Taggart gallery in New York. The exhibition is titled after Flack’s new memoir, With Darkness Came Stars, published by Penn State University Press. In October, Flack will have a show of work from the 1950s to the present at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York.

Now 92, Flack is having a moment. This wasn’t a given, considering she’s always gone against the grain. She was figurative when abstraction and minimalism were ascendant; she used airbrushes when fine artists wouldn’t touch them; her still lifes of lipstick, roses, and beaded necklaces didn’t match the cars and trucks that her fellow Photorealists were painting. And when she decided to be a sculptor all of a sudden, her sculptures were polychrome.

In her memoir, written in Flack’s unmistakably no-nonsense voice, she describes growing up in a Washington Heights apartment where reproductions of old master paintings lined the walls. “The people in these paintings became my friends,” she writes, remembering the bulbous-nosed grandfather by Ghirlandaio above their green velour sofa (next to a Rembrandt and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, no less). Though her mom loved these reproductions, Flack’s family wasn’t particularly arty, and it was a surprise when she got accepted into the High School of Music and Art, and then Cooper Union in 1950.

This was at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and Flack mingled with the more established abstract expressionist painters living downtown. Though interested in the work that Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were making, she ultimately steered clear of Cedar Tavern and its scene. “Art was the most important thing in my life, but I wasn’t going to let it kill me,” writes Flack. “I wasn’t attracted to testosterone-fueled aggression and out-of-control drinking. So I stayed on the outside of the inside, looking, listening, observing, learning.”

After Cooper Union, Flack studied under Josef Albers at Yale. Initially an abstract painter, she increasingly felt drawn to the work of the old masters, becoming first a New Realist and then, in the 1960s, a photorealist. Abstraction did stay with her though, she claims. Her photorealist still lifes have a tilted picture plane and packed patterns that extend to the edges of the canvas, which are both concepts informed by Abstract Expressionism.

Flack moved back to New York, where she became part of a drawing group in the early 1960s that included artists such as Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, Joyce and Max Kozloff, and Raphael Soyer. When she wasn’t drawing from a model with them, she increasingly painted from photographs that she took herself. She converted the bathroom of her studio into a darkroom and taught herself to print her own color photos, something not all photorealists did.

While her peers focused on shiny cars and motorcycles, Flack painted lipsticks and compacts, jewelry and glassware: the everyday stuff of her life. Paintings like Jolie Madame (1972–73) are crammed with sparkly or reflective tchotchkes. This set her apart from the other photorealists and also drew criticism from the growing feminist movement that she was too over-the-top feminine, and therefore, unfeminist.

At some point in the early 1970s she received a postcard in the mail from Whitney Museum curator Marcia Tucker of La Macarena, a 17th-century wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary Madonna, in Seville, Spain. Flack was so taken with the sculpture that she made a pilgrimage to Seville to see it and while there, learned that its maker was a woman, Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán.

“I didn’t care that this art was dismissed as lower-class kitsch,” Flack continues in her memoir, using a word that has been used to describe her own work. “I loved it.” The sculpture inspired a series of paintings, shown in a solo gallery show in 1972, with pieces going to private collections, as well as to the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum (although all these years later, Flack is disappointed that the Met has only displayed their 1971 Macarena of Miracles once).

By the late 1970s Flack had completed her “Vanitas” series (1976–78), a major body of work that included three monumental paintings: Wheel of Fortune, Marilyn, and World War II. Packed with objects as varied as a framed black-and-white snapshot of the artist and her brother Milton as kids and a petit four pastry—these still lifes tackle the passage of time just like the 17th-century Dutch paintings that inspired them.

In 1980 Flack appeared in a group photo on the cover of ARTnews’s October 1980 issue, which asked (as a counterpoint to the landmark Linda Nochlin essay published a few years earlier) “Where Are the Great Men Artists?” (Flack is in the back row, second from the left, smiling at painters Isabel Bishop and Dorothea Rockburne.) She was also among the first women, together with Mary Cassatt, to be included in an updated edition of H.W. Janson’s History of Art textbook in 1986.

By this time Flack was well known. But few knew that, for much of her career, she’d been in an abusive marriage while raising two daughters—one of whom had severe autism. Flack ultimately left her husband, found a suitable environment for her daughter, and remarried. After two years of battling a creative block and depression in the 1980s, she returned to her studio and tried something completely different, experimenting with Plasteline clay. She locked herself in her studio and taught herself to sculpt. She sculpted for the next 10 years, with a particular focus on mythological women. Public commissions soon started coming.

In a recent interview over Zoom, I asked Flack if there’s a constant that ties all her work together—the abstract canvases and the figurative sculptures, the still lifes of banana split sundaes and Spanish Baroque Madonnas. She showed me a little piece of paper that she keeps in a holder on her desk. It’s a quote by artist, curator, and critic Robert Storr that she holds dear, and says he meant as a compliment. “Flack’s work is in overt defiance of good taste,” the note reads. Flack took that a step further, adding, “I don’t want to use the word because I don’t see it that way, but it’s kitsch. And what’s another word for kitsch? It’s something that people can relate to.”

Flack is already planning paintings that she wants to start after her two exhibitions have opened and her book is released. She is unwilling to disclose what they’ll be, but she does have this to say: “They’re not going to be over-the-sofa paintings.”

Caravaggio’s oil paintings of genre scenes, mythological subjects, and biblical stories have survived, but their popularity is a relatively new phenomenon. The artist was commercially successful in his lifetime, but his contemporaries started chipping away at his reputation early on, claiming among other things that he followed nature too closely and ignored the idealization that was so prized during the High Renaissance. One of Caravaggio’s early biographers, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, wrote in 1672 that the artist “lacked invention, decorum, disegno, or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from him, his hand and his mind became empty.” In other words, according to this oft-repeated critique, Caravaggio’s only talent was that he could copy nature well.

That wasn’t true, of course. He pioneered tenebrism, a style in which figures are cloaked in shadow but dramatically illuminated by a single light source. Another invention was his depiction of biblical characters as contemporary figures, painting them warts and all, with dirty fingernails, tan lines, and wrinkles. Still, Caravaggio’s reputation declined until he was rediscovered in the 20th century, when a 1951 exhibition of his paintings in Milan helped reignite interest in him among the general public and scholars.

Caravaggio helped craft the dramatic Baroque style of the Counter-Reformation, but interest in him also stems from his reputation as a troublemaker. He was known to carry an unlicensed sword and look for a fights, a fact verified in records of the 11 trials against him that took place between October 1600 and September 1605. Much of what we know about Caravaggio, in fact, comes from criminal records. They tell us that he once cut a hole in his ceiling to allow more light into his studio, which led his landlord to evict him; that he threw stones at his landlady’s house and sang songs outside her window, hurled a plate at a waiter because he thought a dish of artichokes was undercooked, teased a rival with lewd sexual insults, assaulted a man on the street, and killed a man in a swordfight. He spent much of his adult life as a fugitive. In short, Caravaggio made a singular name for himself both inside and outside his studio.

In her short but fiercely lived life, the Mexican artist produced between 150 and 200 paintings, most of them self-portraits, depictions of family and friends, and still lifes. Figurative and intensely personal, her paintings fuse folklore and symbolism to illustrate her lived experience. They often combine binary elements—night and day, masculine and feminine, being in two places at once, or dual versions of Kahlo herself.

The version of herself that she shared with the public, a distinct persona of bohemian Mexicanidad and liberal politics, is part of what still renders her a pop culture icon today (a new documentary will premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival). Kahlo entranced many significant 20th-century photographers—including Lola Álvarez Bravo, Carl Van Vechten, Nickolas Muray, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Julien Levy, and Dora Maar—who left behind exposures of the artist that continue to fuel our fascination with all things Frida Kahlo.

Her reasons for painting women differed from those of her male peers, though. One could easily look at her canvases and see a saccharine world of woodland fairies wearing chiffon. Look closer, though, and you’ll find a female-dominated realm where men neither belong nor are welcome, the kind of realm preferred in the lesbian circles of 1920s Paris. “There is a darkness and a mystery and a surrealist aspect to her work that is not just candylike,” says Cindy Kang, curator at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation and co-curator of the Laurencin solo exhibition there running through January 21, titled Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris. “Yes, it’s pink and blue and has flowy fabrics and all that,” Kang adds, “but there is a darkness there that is really speaking to these different worlds that she existed in.”

Part of Laurencin’s genius lay in painting works that appealed to her own lesbian community and to independent women like Gertrude Stein, Coco Chanel, and Helena Rubinstein, yet were coded enough to engage male collectors such as John Quinn (who acquired seven of her paintings) and Dr. Albert Barnes (who had at least four Laurencins).

A multimedia artist, Laurencin created paintings and prints, illustrated books, designed costumes and sets for ballet, and did collaborative decorative projects during her five-decade career. And it all began for her, the story goes, with a teacup.

The fly may have looked convincing in this charming story, but the tale itself was probably a complete fiction, along with much else that Vasari wrote about early-14th-century painter Giotto di Bondone. The artist may or may not have been born near Florence in the village of Vespignano, and he probably wasn’t discovered by painter Cimabue while tending a flock of sheep and drawing on rocks. What does hold true, though, is that Giotto helped revive naturalism in painting, bringing empathy and humanity, along with piercing observation, to his figures and illustrations of biblical stories.

Giotto is hailed as the father of the Italian Renaissance, and his name is used to brand colorful markers for emerging (child-aged) artists to this day. He was fêted even in his lifetime. Humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Giotto, wrote in his Decameron (1353) that “so faithful did he remain to nature . . . that whatever he depicted had the appearance, not of a reproduction, but of the thing itself.” Giotto’s reputation lived on, with sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti writing around 1450 that “Giotto saw in art what others did not put into it. He brought forth naturalistic art and gracefulness.”

When Giotto died in 1337 at around the age of 70 (his year of birth is unclear), he was given a ceremonious state funeral in Florence, the first time such an honor was bestowed upon an artist. In his lengthy career he worked across media and subjects, creating large mosaics, altarpieces, painted crucifixes, portraits, and frescoes. There still isn’t scholarly consensus about what works can be firmly attributed to him, although there is widespread agreement that he painted the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, the Bardi Chapel frescoes in Santa Croce, and the Ognissanti Madonna.

“It seemed like it was somewhere out there in the vast universe—far, far away,” lamented Rubin, founder of Atelier Anna Walinska which documents and promotes exhibitions of the modernist paintings, collages, and drawings created by her aunt. With the hope that someone online might recognize the painting of the artist reading a book, Rubin even made it her profile picture on Instagram. After more than a decade, the search led nowhere, and she lost hope.

Then in early 2020, Rubin teamed up with the Arshile Gorky Foundation, which was about to launch a digital catalogue raisonné for the Armenian American artist known for creating energetic abstract paintings. At the time, the whereabouts of around 170 Gorky artworks were unknown, and finding the Walinska portrait was a priority, especially because Walinska was also a gallerist who gave Gorky his first New York show in 1935. The foundation made a “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PAINTING?” ad for the work using a faded slide kept in Walinska’s records, and began circulating the flyer at art fairs, with the hope that new leads would lead to its rediscovery.

Despite the pandemic bringing art fairs to a screeching halt, Rubin decided to keep momentum going by creating an email newsletter about the portrait, a charming surprise that landed in my inbox during lockdown. I contacted Rubin to learn more about the story of this long-lost Gorky portrait of Walinska, which resulted in an article, published by Hyperallergic, that brought renewed interest in Walinska, especially for people previously unfamiliar with the artist, who studied modernism in Paris before returning to New York and creating expressive abstract canvases.

Still, a month went by, then a year. Two years and nothing. “It felt like, okay, we’re just not going to find it,” Rubin said in a recent interview. “Nobody saw it. Or if somebody saw it, they just don’t want us to know—and that’s it.”

But that wasn’t it. A few months ago, the owner of the painting, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted the Gorky Foundation. The foundation’s director, Parker Field, called Rubin right away. “You found the painting,” she recalled having guessed when she answered the phone; Field replied, “The painting found us.”

Ensconced not in Europe but on the East Coast, the portrait belongs to a 94-year-old collector who bought it from a New York gallery in 1986 and now lives in a converted 19th-century knife factory in Rhode Island. The collector’s neighbor read the 2020 article, recognized the portrait, and rushed to tell her.

Unsure what would happen if she came forward, the collector remained silent for over a year. “I told my accountant: ‘When I’m gone, call this person up and tell her where the painting is, and tell her it’s at the museum at RISD,’” she said in an interview, noting her plan to bequeath the portrait to the Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. Earlier this year, she decided she had to let Rubin and the Gorky Foundation see the painting. At last, Rubin and Field saw the painting in person in late May.

The collector had bought the painting without much background information. “I just loved it,” she said about the canvas that Gorky created during a prolific figurative period when he produced portraits of family, friends, models, and himself. After the collector bought a book about Gorky and read up on his relationship with Walinska, the portrait took on different meaning. “She became more real to me in terms of who she was for him, who she was for herself. How gutsy a woman she was for her time,” she said about how Walinska opened the short-lived, avant-garde Guild Gallery, and fervently pursued painting herself. “I could identify with her. That was a time that we both lived, and I’m still doing exactly what I want to do.”

One thing Walinska didn’t want to do was sell the painting. Most of her walls were lined with her own artwork, but the Gorky proudly hung in her foyer. “When [Walinska] talked about Gorky, Gorky was a genius. She loved having that painting,” Rubin said. “It had pride of place—both physically in her apartment, and in her heart.” But as the Upper West Side increasingly went co-op in the early 1980s, including the building she’d lived in for decades, Walinska needed funds and sold artworks from her collection. Her family lost track of it after that.

The artist’s family did hold onto the one other Gorky portrait of Walinska, though—a pencil drawing on the back of a menu from the Lower East Side’s Russian Art Restaurant. It was exhibited this year for the first time at New York’s Graham Shay 1857 gallery as part of a Walinska solo exhibition titled “Calligraphy of Line: The Drawings of Anna Walinska,” installed alongside Walinska’s drawing of Gorky as a pendant.

This drawn portrait of Walinska was also published for the first time with the launch of the digital Gorky catalogue raisonné in November 2021. In the less than two years since its release, the catalogue has helped over 40 works by the artist resurface—a mix of ones listed as “whereabouts unknown” at the time of publication and some entirely new to the foundation. The painted Walinska portrait is a highlight among other exciting rediscoveries, such as an ink and graphite drawing titled Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia (1931) that was only known from an early photograph of Gorky in his studio.

Field believes that digital catalogues raisonné help works resurface more easily, a reason the foundation opted for it over print one. “We expected an increase in correspondence post-publication through what we knew from the experiences of other online catalogues raisonné,” Field said. “And more logically, if you’re doing an online catalogue raisonné you have more readers, more viewers, than you do with a print catalogue. If you have more readers, then you have more attention.”

That still leaves, however, at least 141 Gorky paintings unaccounted for, including another one of a fellow artist, Portrait of George Yphantis (1926–27), of the Turkish-born painter and friend of Gorky’s who later taught in the fine art department of Montana State University. Painted after a visit to the Boston area, Gorky gifted it directly to Yphantis; it hasn’t been exhibited or heard of since. A rediscovery such as this one will fill in gaps in Gorky’s oeuvre and add to a fuller understanding of his work.

“Because of its wider accessibility, a digital catalogue raisonné can raise public awareness about missing artworks and encourage individuals to come forward with relevant information,” said Alexandra Kaiser, managing director of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association and research curator of the Archipenko Foundation. “While digital catalogues raisonnés offer powerful tools, finding missing artworks can still be a complex and challenging task. It often requires diligent research, collaboration, and a bit of luck.”

She created landscapes at first, and ultimately geometric abstractions that incorporated Asian iconography, especially Buddhist symbols. Now her first institutional solo exhibition in more than 40 years, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, displays the full breadth of her work. It is open now until August 13.

“Her different phases of working look quite different from each other, which I think is part of the reason she’s been quite overshadowed as an artist,” says Maja Wismer, the exhibition curator and head of contemporary art at Kunstmuseum Basel. “She didn’t develop that one signature style. You can really trace the different phases.”

One of the things in Kelly’s studio, for instance, was a book with thumbnail-size drawings of his paintings that listed details like the number of gesso layers and which paints he used (sometimes also listing their compositions, since he mixed his own rainbow of brilliant azures, emerald greens, and rich reds). “Ellsworth was obsessive about cataloging things his entire life,” writes Kevin Salatino, curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, in the catalog for the upcoming exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings.” “He documented everything and had a numbering system for his work. He is a gift to art historians because everything’s signed, dated, saved, et cetera, and there’s clearly a huge archive.”

This year, as the art world marks the 100th anniversary of Kelly’s birth, a number of current and upcoming museum exhibitions are focusing on particular facets of his work, from the canonical to the barely known.