Forrest Bess
1911–1977
With their diminutive scale and formal economy, Forrest Bess’s paintings belie the complex, highly personal symbology from which they emerged. Born and raised in the small East Texas town of Bay City, Bess became fascinated by connections between religion and sexuality while an undergraduate at the University of Texas, where he read widely on subjects such as Greek mythology, Hinduism, and psychoanalysis. After a psychological breakdown led to his discharge from the US Army in 1946, Bess moved permanently to his family’s bait-fish camp at Chinquapin, on the Gulf, where he lived a meager, isolated existence for the next twenty years, dividing his time between fishing, painting, and various odd jobs. He nonetheless maintained extensive correspondence with individuals in the outside world, including the dealer Betty Parsons, whose New York gallery represented his work beginning in 1949; the prominent art historian Meyer Schapiro; and even the psychoanalyst Carl Jung.
At Chinquapin, Bess had begun to paint images, or “inward visions” as he called them, based on a language of symbolic forms he saw in his mind as he drifted off to sleep. Upon waking, he would quickly record these forms in sketches, later elaborating them in richly textured oil compositions such as Drawings. Like most of Bess’s paintings, the work is small in scale and possesses a frame that the artist fabricated from thin strips of found wood, adding to its intimate, handmade quality. By the late 1950s Bess had developed a radical theory that androgyny was the key to eternal life, an idea that pervaded his art and led him to perform surgery on himself with the goal of becoming a hermaphrodite. While Bess identified some of his abstract symbols with specific meanings related to his theory, others, like those in Drawings, remain mysterious. Nonetheless, his elemental forms evoke the biomorphic archetypes that suffused avant-garde painting during the postwar years—especially in the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters.
Introduction
Forrest Clemenger Bess (October 5, 1911 – November 10, 1977) was an American painter and fisherman. He was discovered and promoted by the art dealer Betty Parsons. He is known for his abstract, symbol-laden paintings based on what he called "visions."
Wikidata identifier
Q5470435
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 23, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500099698
Names
Forrest Bess, Forrest Clemenger Bess
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 23, 2025.
