115 later that year, in advance of the impending war, he moved to New York. Matta’s early work was primarily nonfigurative explorations of color and biomorphic forms that traversed landscapes created in his inner subconscious. By the early 1940s he developed a visual language that evolved from the morphing of forms into figurative constructions. These became highly complex narrations and, while keeping within his use of the subconscious landscapes, the action became more visceral and animated. Matta was one of the most knowledgeable of the surrealists about Oceanic art and he had a large and quite fine collection of New Ireland sculptures that included malangans, friezes, and masks of many descriptions. He was affected as much by the emotional impact of the pieces as by their formal structural qualities, and he incorporated both the emotional and structural in many of his monster-/beast-like personages, especially in his work from the late 1940s and 1950s (figs. 14, 15, and 16). Formally, he assimilated the jutting protuberances, ribbed cavities, elongation of the vertical axis, and outstretched limb structures that are hallmarks of malangan carving while enunciating their primal nature in pulsating rhythms. Matta greatly appreciated the bold use of color in the Bismarck Archipelago, a color usage that also vividly defines the essence of his own art. Of all the early twentieth-century artists associated with
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