Forrest Bess

Who was Forrest Bess?

Forrest Bess Painter, fisherman, visionary, eccentric. Born in Bay City, Texas, Bess picked up his love of art from his mother. His father worked in the oil fields and ran a bait fishing camp of the Texas coast in Chinquapin. After a short stint in the army where he suffered a slight breakdown related to a head injury, Bess moved to this isolated bait camp and began painting his uncontrollable visions. During his most creative period, 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, along with artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. In the 1950s, he also began a lifelong correspondence with art professor and author Meyer Schapiro, and sexologist John Money. In these and other letters Bess makes it clear that his paintings were only part of a grander theory, based on alchemy, the philosophy of Carl Jung, and the rituals of Australian aborigines, which proposed that becoming a hermaphrodite was the key to immortality. In 1960, Bess operated on himself to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. This physical manifestation of his theory never achieved the results he had hoped for and, ironically, this quest for immortality was the beginning of a slow decline in both his health and his creative output. In 1977, he died in a nursing home in Bay City, Texas after a long battle with alcoholism. Throughout his career, Bess admired the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Arthur Dove, but the best of his paintings stand alone as truly original works of art. His best art consists of only about 100 small paintings, many with simple driftwood frames that he built himself. The majority of these paintings are in private collections, although the Menil Collection, Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Whitney Museum in New York have Bess paintings in their collections.