The fifteen prints in Howard Hodgkin’s “Views”—as this exhibition was titled—invite comparison with the work of Matisse, an influence the artist has acknowledged. (The ten lithographs, two screenprints, and three etchings with aquatint traveled from the gallery’s London location, where the show debuted this past March.) In Lotus, 1980, and other works, Hodgkin uses an interior frame, suggestively a window frame, as Matisse did in The Open Window, 1905, and View of Notre Dame, 1914. Yet Matisse depicted readily recognizable objects, figures, and scenes; Hodgkin, by contrast, produces imagery that is significantly more abstract. He looks into himself even as he looks outward. The world that Hodgkin pictures through windows becomes his inner world—a sort of inscape (to use poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s word) within the landscape.

These views are always rather moody. Hodgkin mixes colors, often primaries, and shapes, both organic and geometrically pure, to lyrically dramatic effect, as in Red Listening Ear and Blue Listening Ear, both 1986. (I wildly associated these works with the Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik’s Listening with the Third Ear [1948]; that is, the inner ear.) Almost always there is an aura of both hedonism and melancholy. Perhaps the most plangent piece is For Bernard Jacobson, 1977–79, named for the purveyor of this gallery, who supported the production of many of the prints that were on view. In that work, bright blue and yellow are nearly enveloped in blackness. More hedonistic is Birthday Party, 1977–78, with its lush, even lavish, surface and yellow slices that vaguely recall leaves. In Bleeding, 1981–82, a lithograph hand-colored in gouache, the sharp contrast between a broad black interior frame and a small, amorphous, eerily luminous landscape of turquoise and tan suggests that the hedonism and melancholy cannot always be reconciled. Monsoon, 1987–88, reveals the artist’s appreciation of nature, a joie de vivre that clashes with the darker, more nihilistic chords struck in other works. Hodgkin transforms nature by letting it mirror his own brooding.

Indian Room, 1967, like many pieces from the 1960s, exhibits simpler handling than the majority of the prints made later; it has a streamlined look. Inspired by a trip to India, the image is also suggestive of a landscape, featuring a narrow band of alternating black and white stripes as the ground beneath a red sky. A circle with a reddish lower half and a grayish upper half may represent the sun; a single black gestural mark touches the print’s edge and “slashes” through it to the picture’s bottom. Later, in the 1980s, Hodgkin would allow his colors to mix, applying pigment in layers and bringing about an odd roughness and sultry intensity. Such works are masterpieces of aesthetic control and concentration. For all their intimacy—the way in which they evoke Hodgkin’s inscape—they are peculiarly grand statements of romantic abstraction.

—Donald Kuspit