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Among the works of great, exhaustively studied artists who have been dead for more than 70 years, true discoveries tend to be scarce.

That is why a gallery exhibition opening next month in Manhattan provides a seismic surprise for fans and scholars of the Armenian American artist Arshile Gorky (1904-48): An entirely new Gorky painting has been found hidden under a famous painting he did at the very end of his life, during an extraordinary period of artistic productivity, The New York Times reports.

The new work, which the Gorky estate is calling “Untitled (Virginia Summer)” (1946-47), is a brand-new addition to his oeuvre. Nobody knew it existed — though his two daughters, one of his biographers and a couple of conservators had long known that something was there. His daughter Maro Spender called it “a truly remarkable happening.”

Michaela Ritter, one of the two Swiss conservators who did the uncovering, said: “It’s not that we have something like this every year. It’s really special.”

The new work, a painting on canvas, was tucked just beneath “The Limit,” (1947), a well-known painting on paper that had been on loans to the National Gallery of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for years, hanging on the walls with no one the wiser about the treasure underneath it.