If you see an exhibition devoted to the late Danish artist Vilhelm Lundstrøm at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen in the next two years, there’s a tiny chance it may have something to do with us. When we contacted the museum to use images of his works from their collection for this story, we told them how surprised we were that they’d never given him a solo show. That seems to be the story of Lundstrøm’s legacy, though — he may be among the most famous Danish painters (or Modernist painters, at least), credited for being the country’s first and foremost Cubist, but he’s not on most people’s radar. Yet if this story is the first you’re hearing of him, you’ll probably be seeing his work everywhere as soon as you close this page.

That’s partly because his work was seminal then, and partly because his aesthetic feels so relevant now: the color-blocking, the pastels-meets-brights palette, the geometries, the two-dimensional planes filled with three-dimensional brushstrokes. If Picasso has been the go-to throwback art icon of the past few years, it only makes sense that Lundstrøm, who carried Picasso’s torch to Scandinavia in the late ’20s, would be enjoying some sort of ascendancy too. He certainly is for us.