During her life, the work of the Iceland-born American painter Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000) was known only to a handful of admirers. They were fans of her hushed, Modernist figuration at a particularly unreceptive time, one dominated first by the brute and emotive gestures of the postwar avant-garde, then by Pop art, and finally by the anemic conceptualism that whimpered the century out. The arc of Matthiasdottir’s efforts was, on the other hand, anchored on each end by work with strong, clear colors applied with stoic vigor.

Looking at the 100 oil paintings and works on paper in the excellent retrospective on view at Scandinavia House, I couldn’t help feeling troubled by the vagaries of time and taste. Were this, say, the first show by a contemporary 25-year-old, rather than by a deceased late 20th-century artist, I would be witnessing the breakout of a new star. Go to any Chelsea gallery that shows the newest German, Dutch, or American painting – and such things get collectors panting now – and you will find pared-down figures and broad planes of color similar to those in Matthiasdottir’s canvases. You will find childlike watercolors that in style are almost indistinguishable from those she made in the late 1940s. The art world has come round to her way of seeing things, but she died a bit too soon to appreciate this latest turn of the wheel.

By all accounts, Matthiasdottir never lusted after fame; she was thrilled to be able to paint at all. Hers was the first generation of Icelanders to embrace Modern art, though she left her native Reykjavik at age 17 to study art first in Copenhagen and later in Paris. Toward the beginning of World War II, she moved to New York, where she studied with the great German emigre artist Hans Hoffmann and eventually married the painter Leland Bell.

By the late 1940s, Matthiasdottir began exhibiting in the cooperative Jane Street Gallery. While the show at Scandinavia House includes two canvases – offered here to the public for the first time – that date to the early 1940s, before she left Iceland for the last time, the bulk of pieces on view comes from the period during which she lived in the States. The sweep of work has a remarkable consistency. Summing up her life’s work in a catalog essay, Petrun Petursdottir writes, “There are hardly any experiments or flirtations with other styles of painting. Instead, each step is a clear progression from the preceding ones.” True enough, though the observation doesn’t quite tell the whole story.

In subject matter, the earliest canvases certainly herald what will come. “Old Town, Reykjavik” (c. 1940) depicts an almost Cubist townscape from on high, somber in its browns and yellows. “Seated Figure” (c. 1940) presents a more expressionistically rendered woman seated on a divan, her face obscured, her clothes and the room suffused in drab browns and grays. All her life, Matthiasdottir would swivel between these subjects: impersonal landscapes and figures in intimate settings.

Blocky and deliberately naive, Matthiasdottir ‘s gouaches of the late 1940s presage the ebullient and stripped-down landscapes painted during the last decades of her career. Hard rectangular planes of saturated yellow and blue structure “Red Table in Room” (c. 1948), in which a table set for a meal stands in a bare yellow room. A spreading plane of blue – floor and shadow – is balanced by a similar blue window above.

Like all her best efforts, these works on paper couch their sophistication in a pose of simplicity. It is only in the 1950s and early 1960s, when she swerved from the clear stylistic progression, that the force of her unadorned syntax wanes: The paintings become brushier, more gestural and emotive. To my eye, the fervid tenor of works such as “Temma in Braids, Reading” (1957), where swirling and energetic brushstrokes in mixed hues make essentially quiet subjects – in this case a young girl reading on a bed or sofa – incongruously overwrought.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Matthiasdottir had found her way back to a more convincing, streamlined look, one that dispensed with anything – depths defined by shadow, ornament, gestural brushstrokes – that might distract from the pure interplay of shape and color. Compare, for instance, the humdrum “Portrait of Temma With Pink Hat and Fan” (c. 1964-65) with the pointedly sober “Self Portrait With Dark Coat” (1994). In the former, the modeling of facial features and the insistent and energetic application of paint feel tired, like an Impressionist pastiche, while the power of the self-portrait derives from the severity of its clean lines and blocks of color.

The show’s triumph sounds in the final landscapes, when Matthiasdottir returned in oil to the lucidity of her early gouaches. Bands of color and undulant forms, in the pastoral landscapes, become platforms for schematic figures – a faceless person, sheep. The townscapes depend less on this Milton Avery-like play of figure and form. They appear almost as consoles of bright, blinking triangles, squares, and oblongs softened by wispy skies and seas.

One might say that Matthiasdottir refined her gifts less through a straightforward progression than by circling back to reinvigorate her youthful vision. At her strongest – and most of the work on view at Scandinavia House is superbly muscular – she cavorted in those flat lands where Modernism meets folk reductivism and where Nordic reserve is energized by dancing color. That contemporary styles have circled back to embrace this type of painting is perhaps unshocking. But I have no doubt that anyone unfamiliar with this singular artist will leave the show surprised, and delighted.