Discover the Artists the
Internet Never Met
There is a particular kind of silence that follows certain artists into the present. It is not the silence of obscurity, but the silence of timing. They did their most important work in the decades before the internet existed to remember it.
Some artists disappear from the historical record because the work wasn't good enough to remember. However with many artists of varying success of the 70s a different issue presents itself: the internet simply forgot their name. They might have been well known in the art scene and with New York art galleries however that simply didnt translate to information absorbed by the internet we know today. So we're taking the time to highlight a few artists we carry product for on the site to dig a little deeper into their interesting and unique stories. In some cases they restored a grand palace by hand, hid motors inside sculpture, moved to a mountain town and invented their own civilization on paper, got recruited into a Cold War cultural program by the CIA without knowing it, hitchhiked their way into art school or broke early ground for women in the art world. Every one of them has work that has outlived the paperwork about their lives. These are their stories - enjoy x
01 United States / Finland
The Artist the CIA Accidentally Sent to Finland
Howard Smith
Howard Smith's career started with an invitation he had no reason to be suspicious of. In 1962, after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and serving nearly a decade in the U.S. Army stationed across postwar Europe, Smith was invited to Helsinki to take part in a cultural festival called "Young America Presents." What he didn't know at the time was that the event had been quietly organized, and funded, by the CIA, as part of a broader Cold War effort to project American culture abroad.
He never went home. Smith settled in Finland, becoming one of only a small handful of Black artists working in the country at the time, and built a career that moved fluidly between fine art and industrial design. He designed textiles for the Vallila Silk Factory, including a bold floral curtain pattern named for Miriam Makeba that remains in production today, decades later, and, starting in 1986, spent nearly a decade designing dishware and ceramics for Arabia, Finland's best-known ceramics house, fusing African motifs with Scandinavian modernist form. In his own studio practice, he moved between collage, quilting, assemblage, screenprinting, and sculpture built from found objects: old hats, discarded purses, scrap metal.
Smith briefly returned to the United States to teach at Scripps College in California from 1976 to 1984, mounting a show of his masks and appliqué work that earned a small write-up in the Los Angeles Times, before going back to Finland for the rest of his life.
The interesting fact: Smith remained largely unknown in his birth country until well after his death in 2021. A major retrospective, "The Art and Design of Howard Smith," opened at the Palm Springs Art Museum with a monograph from Radius Books, and is set to travel to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, the country that, thanks to a Cold War recruitment drive he wasn't told about, became his home for nearly sixty years.
02 France / India
The Painter Who Bought a Palace to Save It
Nadine Le Prince
Nadine Le Prince is a French painter, which is the part of her story that gets the least attention, because in 1998 she did something no working artist is really supposed to do: she found a crumbling 19th-century mansion on the other side of the world and decided her life's second act would be putting it back together.
The building is the Nand Lal Devra Haveli, built in 1802 by a merchant family in Fatehpur, a town in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, India, once a wealthy caravan-trade crossroads famous for its painted mansions. By the time Le Prince came across it, on a trip through the region, the haveli had been abandoned for years: its frescoed courtyards obscured by cobwebs and peeling plaster, its carved woodwork rotting, laundry drying over what had once been some of the finest hand-painted walls in northern India. She was, by her own account, spellbound, and she never really left.
What followed was a restoration measured in decades, not seasons. Le Prince tracked down restorers trained in the fresco al secco technique needed to stabilize the original paintings, rebuilt the woodwork, and slowly turned the haveli into what is now known as the Nadine Le Prince Haveli and Cultural Centre: part gallery, part boutique hotel, part working artist residency, with a swimming pool and bar added into a structure built two centuries before either existed.
The interesting fact: Le Prince's restoration effectively created a new local industry. Her purchase and very public devotion to the haveli is widely credited with showing other buyers that Shekhawati's abandoned mansions could be saved rather than demolished, kicking off a wider wave of heritage restoration across the region. Visitors today can tour parts of the haveli with a guide, many of them French exchange students working alongside her.
It is a strange kind of legacy for a painter: to be remembered, at least in Rajasthan, more for the building she rescued than the canvases she made. Both, it turns out, needed the same thing from her, patience, and a refusal to let something remarkable go unrecorded.
03 Belgium / France
The Sculptor Who Made Stillness Move
Pol Bury
Pol Bury built a career on a single, stubborn idea: that a sculpture could move so slowly you could never actually catch it moving.
Born in La Louvière, Belgium, in 1922, Bury fell in as a teenager with the Surrealist circle around René Magritte, joined the Belgian resistance when the Germans invaded, and spent the late 1940s as part of CoBrA, the short-lived Copenhagen–Brussels–Amsterdam avant-garde movement, before it dissolved in 1951. He might have stayed a Surrealist painter indefinitely. Then, in 1950 at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, he saw an exhibition of Alexander Calder's mobiles, and abandoned painting almost overnight.
By 1957 he was hiding small motors inside his sculptures, engineering pieces that shifted a few degrees over the course of several minutes, motion so slow it registered more as a feeling than an event. "I am searching for the point which exists between the moving and the non-moving," he said of the work. In 1955 he'd already shown alongside Marcel Duchamp and Calder in Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise René, the exhibition now considered the formal birth of kinetic art as a category. Major public commissions followed: a fountain for the University of Iowa in 1969, work at the Palais Royal in Paris, and a commission for the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
The odd fact: Bury refused, as a matter of principle, to explain how his motorized mechanisms actually worked. He considered the concealment part of the piece, the same instinct that kept his sculptures from ever quite finishing a gesture before pausing again. He died in Paris in 2005; his work now sits permanently in MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Tate, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Shop this print 1978 Pol Bury French Art Exhibition Print →
04 France
The Landscape Painter Who Refused to Paint Landscapes
Jean Messagier
Jean Messagier spent his career being called the leader of a movement he never agreed to lead, in a style he refused to name.
Born in Paris in 1920, Messagier spent his childhood shuttling between the city and Franche-Comté, the rural region his family came from, where he made his first watercolors at ten years old, landscapes that would stay with him even after he'd stopped painting anything you could call a landscape. He trained at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs under François Desnoyer, and, on the side, studied poetry with Paul Valéry at the Collège de France. In 1943, at twenty-three, he held his first solo exhibition at the Château de Montbéliard.
His early work carried the influence of Picasso and Paul Klee, but by 1953 he had deliberately broken with Post-Cubism, chasing something harder to describe: light itself, "approached abstractly." The result got filed under several labels at once, lyrical abstraction, nuagisme, tachisme, art informel, and Messagier accepted none of them, insisting throughout his life that the line between abstraction and figuration was a false one. He co-founded the Salon d'Octobre in Paris and, from 1962 until his death, exhibited widely across France and abroad as one of the defining figures of French painting's postwar generation.
The interesting fact: Messagier's output went well beyond canvas. He designed carnival floats and wine bottle labels, wrote poetry, composed music, and was, by most accounts, a serious amateur mycologist, hunter and fisherman in his spare time, a naturalist's curiosity that shows up, again and again, in the "abstract landscapes" that made his name. He was named a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur before his death in 1999.
Shop this print 1970s Jean Messagier French Art Exhibition Lithograph →
05 Germany / France
The Runaway Who Drew His Way Into Art School
Jan Voss
Before Jan Voss was a painter, he was a teenage runaway. Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, Voss left home as a young man and hitchhiked as far as Turkey, staying six months before his father sent him a train ticket home. It was the drawings he brought back from that trip, not any formal training, that got him admitted into the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1956 to 1960.
In 1960, on a year-abroad scholarship, Voss moved to Paris. He never really left. For the next decade-plus he exhibited alongside the Figuration Narrative group, developing a technique built almost entirely on improvisation: tearing, crumpling, and gluing scraps of paper to find an image, rather than starting from a plan. The results, saturated with black line work and loose color, populate themselves with recurring half-invented figures, animals, silhouettes, small domestic scenes, that Voss described as an attempt at "creating order" inside perpetual, complex chaos.
His career carried real institutional weight even as his name stayed relatively quiet outside collector circles: a teaching post at the Hamburg Art Academy in 1966–67, a professorship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1987 to 1992, and a one-man show at Art Cologne in 2002 to strong critical notice.
The interesting fact: Voss's work now sits in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a level of institutional recognition that rarely gets attached to the story of how it started: a teenager, a thumb out on a road to Turkey, and a stack of drawings that talked an academy into taking a chance on him.
06 France
The Woman Who Etched the Bottom of the Sea
Gilou Brillant
Start with a fact that shouldn't need stating but does: Gilou Brillant is a woman, working in a postwar French print world where the biggest names, Mourlot's roster, the Maeght stable, were overwhelmingly men's. She built a four-decade career under her own name, on her own terms, and still ended up as a footnote rather than a chapter.
Born in Essertines, France, in 1935, Brillant trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before passing through two of the city's most demanding ateliers, Studio Julian and Studio Friedlander, the latter run by printmaker Johnny Friedlander, one of the era's great training grounds for intaglio technique. What she did with that training was distinctive: deep, oceanic abstractions built through aquatint and carborundum etching, a process that involves grinding an abrasive directly into the printing plate to produce rich, unpredictable texture. One gallery text asks whether she's "inventorying the depths of the earth", an odd way to describe an etching, and, looking at the work, not far off.
By the 1970s her exhibition record read like a world tour with no publicist behind it: Paris, Lyon, Brussels, Bruges, Cologne, Luxembourg, New York, Dallas, Houston, plus shows at the World Bank in Washington and the Corcoran Gallery, a rare institutional credential for a woman working in editioned printmaking at the time.
The interesting fact: Brillant's editions were sometimes published through Editions Denise René, the same Paris gallery whose landmark 1955 exhibition, Le Mouvement, launched kinetic art as a movement, the very show that redirected Pol Bury's career, featured earlier on this page. Two artists on this list, unaware of each other's place in it, once shared the same gallery walls.
