According to Professor Claude Cernuschi, writing in a catalogue for a Matta exhibition at
Boston College (see external link below), Matta's use of the term
inscape for a series of
landscape-like
abstract or
surrealist paintings reflects "the
psychoanalytic view of the mind as a three-dimensional space: the 'inscape'." The 'inscape' concept is particularly apt for Matta's works of the late 1930s. As
Dawn Adès (p. 233) writes, "A series of brilliant oil paintings done during the years of his [Matta's] first association with the
Surrealists explore visual metaphors for the mental landscape." And Valerie Fletcher, in
Crosscurrents of Modernism (p. 241), writes that during this time Matta "created with startling mastery the paintings he called 'inscapes' or 'psychological morphologies.' " See also Miriam Basilio's essay, "
Wifredo Lam's 'The Jungle' and Matta's 'Inscapes' ". The term
inscape was later taken up by the leading Australian surrealist
James Gleeson, American
abstract artists such as
James Brooks,
Jane Frank, and
Mary Frank (no relation), and even a group of British
fantasy artists founded by
Brigid Marlin in 1961 and calling themselves the 'Inscape Group.' (The latter group may have had in mind another sense of the word '
inscape', associated with the British poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins. See the article titled simply '
inscape' for more information on this.) More recently, in a 1998 review of a Mary Frank exhibition in
New York City (cited below),
Carol Diehl writes, "Titled 'Inscapes', the
paintings are
landscapes of the
soul...." Also clearly referring to the psychoanalytical meaning of the word as described by Prof. Cernuschi and others above, the leading journal of
art therapy was formerly called simply
Inscape. The journal is now called
International journal of art therapy : Inscape. (This is not to be confused with the
Inscape magazine produced by Brigid Marlin's
Society for Art of Imagination.) ==Architectural interiors as 'inscapes'==