A little less than a year ago, among the many startup tasks on newly arrived Art Gallery of Ontario director Stephan Jost’s docket was what to do with his office.

Recently vacated by his predecessor, Matthew Teitelbaum, the walls were bare, and, given its bank of south-facing windows, that was how they would mostly remain; paintings, drawing and photography don’t do well in direct sunlight, a particular faux-pas in institutions charged with their immaculate conservation.

So, with a shrug, Jost wedged in a visit to the sculpture storage vaults in the gallery’s sub-basement, where heartier, sun-resistant office fare might be found. “I think it was when I walked past the second Giacometti that I realized we had to do something,” Jost said, much more recently.

Late last month, the director offered a quick walk-through of phase one of what his inadvertent treasure hunt has yielded: the gallery’s Look: Forward initiative which, by some time next year, will see a complete reinstallation of virtually all of its permanent collection displays (this first phase opened at the end of March). All in, that’s 70,000 square feet worth of moving pieces — almost 20 per cent of the gallery’s entire 583,000 square feet, and a more than 50 per cent increase in the permanent collection’s previous footprint.

It’s an enormous project, and with the director’s stamp — his first since arriving last spring. The content itself has tasked the curators (though as you might expect, one of the Giacomettis, the 1929 bronze work Three Figures Outdoors, was among the first to be dusted off; it’s on view right now), and all departments will take their turn. It will touch almost every part of the building — plastic sheeting and locked doors bar the entry to several galleries-in-transition right now — as well as some long untouched: Along the walkway surrounding Walker Court, the gallery’s airy central hub, several vitrines were installed with Inuit carvings — the first time in more than a decade art has ever been put there.

First at bat has been the department of Modern art, plumbing the vaults for early-to-mid 20th century Modernism. In a tight span of three adjacent rooms, now sporting an array of greatest hits and lost treasures, are its finds: Giacometti, the catalyst, was acquired in 1989, but has been rarely seen here for 20 years or more (the AGO’s exhibition archive for the piece only goes back to 1998); a rough, gestural bust by Modern master Henri Matisse, Jeanette V, cast in 1930, last seen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, of all places, in Waterloo in 2005, and not at the AGO since 2001.

But the prizewinner here for disappearing is Painting No. 147, a big, expressive work of gestural abstraction from 1959 by the Spanish artist Luis Feito. Acquired in 1962, it is “amazingly … on display for the first time” — literally ever, since the day it left Feito’s studio — according to the gallery’s own text on the wall.

How can artworks be kept away from the eyes of the audience for which they were acquired for years, or even decades?

A few reasons. For some, they’re in demand: Three Figures Outdoors had a spurt of travel that saw it travelling to exhibitions in Montreal, Zurich, New York and London all between 1998 and 2001 (it went on view briefly here in 2015, not as part of a formal show; previous to that, it hadn’t been seen anywhere since a Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition on Surrealism in 2011). Pablo Picasso’s Femme Assisse, from 1927, rarely seen here, has had its passport stamped more than a dozen times, being in almost constant motion on loan since 2001.

Another Picasso, the tiny blue-period La Soupe, from 1902, has bounced since 1998 from Boston to Washington, D.C., to Nashville to Ocala, Fla., to Buffalo to Osaka, Japan. It hasn’t been seen here for a decade, and in September 2018, it’ll be on the move again — this time to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Others, like Feito’s, simply vanish into the vaults, perhaps lacking context, occasion or loan requests to keep them in the public imagination.

Witness the fate of iconic high-Modern sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s Sea Form (Porthmeor) from 1958, a majestic, organic swoop of dark stone. Since it was first shown at the AGO in 1964, it’s barely been seen, here or anywhere else; it’s been brought up from the vaults only four times in the past 50-odd years, the last one in 1995. Another, a large, iconic minimal work by Josef Albers, Homage to the Square (Oasis), from 1961, has shown only once, in 1996.

Collections, of course, can be unwieldy things, vast (the AGO’s numbers some 90,000 pieces; about 4,000 are on view at any given time) and often bogged down with more chaff than wheat. Teitelbaum, prior to his departure, had talked about clearing the cobwebs and winnowing through the AGO’s holdings to divest of some of the less-desirable works (some things are rarely or never shown for good reason); Jost, informally, has signalled an intention to advance that mission.

Being buffered by volume and hampered by limited floor space are two more reasons works can languish in the dark, but there are forces, too, that can bring them to light. Not part of Look: Forward has been the gallery’s Tributes and Tributaries, an exhibition of work made in Toronto from recently installed curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art Wanda Nanibush, whose fresh-eyed scan through the collection has brought back works not seen in decades, and some of them, never.

Assistant curator of Modern Art Kenneth Brummel, who arrived just over a year ago from Kansas City, brought his own fresh view of the gallery’s holdings to phase one of Look: Forward, excavating rarely seen gems few would have known the gallery to even possess: Natalia Goncharova’s The Bridge, from 1914, a spectacular small work from one of the few female icons of the Russian avant-garde; Alexander Archipenko’s Flat Torso, from 1914; cubist master Fernand Léger’s Femme à Genou, from 1921; Abstract Expressionist forefather Arshile Gorky’s They Will Take My Island, 1944, which, according to gallery archives, was acquired in 1980 and has never been shown; and Chaim Soutine’s remarkable, rough and dynamic The Village Church, from 1919–1922.

The display is rounded out with old favourites — works that seem almost as permanent on the walls here as the doors on their hinges: Franz Kline’s big black and white Ab Ex masterpiece, Cuppola (1958-60), or the cosy familiarity of Picasso’s Nu aux mains serrées, from 1905-06 (it’s been on view here, with few interruptions, since 2011).

Rejoined with lost treasures, it’s like a reunion of old friends, a deeper contextual frame for the gallery’s greatest-hits acquisitions over the years.

But if there’s a quibble, and it’s not a small one, it would be the levelling effect displays of these sorts tend to have. It’s the sense that, surrounded by universally loved big names (even when leavened by the surprising and unusual), you could be anywhere — a sealed esthetic environment apart from the world outside its doors.

It’s not, of course, and disconnecting Canada from Modernism, as appears to be what’s happening here, is to shortchange the audience and the country both. I’m the last, typically, to beat the Group of Seven drum, unless it’s to fold them into a larger, non-Canadiana context.

Here’s one: Look: Forward 1.0 opens with a selection of early-20th century post-Impressionist landscape painting (hey, didn’t we have some guys who did that around here?) into which the craft of, say, Tom Thomson would naturally fit (Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin’s Le Travas: matin, temps gris, from 1907, has a distinctly arboreal, Thomson-y vibe).

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In the second gallery, a rare figurative piece by Montreal abstract painter and Automatiste Paul-Émile Borduas tucks in beside Giacometti, Goncharova, Joan Miro and Emil Nolde.

Borduas is, sore-thumb-like, the lone Canadian anywhere here, and he prompts some wondering. Wouldn’t it be kind of nice to see the angular cubism of Kathleen Munn, a Toronto-based solitary avant-gardist of the same period, very present in the AGO’s vaults, tucked in as well, somewhere between the Léger and Albert Gleizes?

And lastly, in room three, where Hepworth and David Smith are represented by robust abstract sculpture, inserting our own Sorel Etrog — much present in the collection and beloved of Sam and Ayala Zacks, the legendary Toronto patrons who donated much of the work on view here to the AGO in the first place — wouldn’t be even a slight stretch. And what about drawing a link from the previous room, between the thick, deliberate abstraction of Borduas (have a look upstairs, where the museum has several) and his Automatiste peers to their New York contemporaries in Gorky and Kline?

The gallery is just beginning to explore the depths of the permanent collection, a revitalizing churn that puts on view varying priorities and tastes over the years. It has already turned up some wonders. But let’s remember: There’s nothing more permanent about the AGO than the city and country in which it makes its home, and that can’t be tucked in storage and forgotten.

Correction – April 13, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that said the AGO has never installed artworks in the walkway surrounding Walker Court. In fact, art was installed there until the early 2000s.