Inscape (visual art)

Though the term inscape has been applied to stylistically diverse artworks, it usually conveys some notion of representing the artist's psyche as a kind of interior landscape.

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.'

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.'

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.