For years, they languished in a Long Island garage, old canvasses piled in a stack. Then they came close to being thrown into a garbage truck.

For the last month, some of them have had a temporary home that could not be more different: the whiter-than-white walls of a Madison Avenue gallery, with the spotlights in the ceiling aimed just so.

The paintings are the work of Arthur Pinajian, a reclusive artist whom the art world had not known much about. Now, 14 years after his death, he has fans who mention him in the same sentence as Gauguin and Cézanne. The art historian William Innes Homer wrote that Mr. Pinajian had pursued art with “the single-minded focus” that those other painters had shown and that “Pinajian was a creative force to be reckoned with.”