Forrest Bess was an American artist, mystic, and ascetic whose life and work have often been compared to the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s. Throughout his life as an artist, Bess tried hard to connect a personal symbology with meaning, developing a complex visual vocabulary to accompany his obsessive devotion to beliefs and theories that alienated him from the mainstream.
Background
Bess was born in Bay City, Texas, United States, on October 5, 1911. He was the first child of Arnold and Minta Bess. His father was an itinerant oil worker, and Bess spent his childhood in various oil towns throughout Texas and Oklahoma.
Education
Forrest Bess picked up his love of art from his mother. In 1918 he executed his first drawings, copied from encyclopedia. Bess took his first private painting lessons from a neighbour in Corsicana, Texas, in 1924. In 1929 he entered the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University), where he began to study architecture. However, he had great difficulty with physics, math, and engineering requirements. Forrest Bess became interested in descriptive geometry, English literature, Hinduism, and Greek mythology, as well as the works of Darwin and Freud.
In 1931 Bess transfered to the University of Texas. There he developed friendship with Professor Sam Gideon, who encouraged his study of religion. In two years he left the university.
Career
Around 1933 Bess worked for a short time as a roughneck in various oilfields to earn money and also made several trips to Mexico. There he started to paint in a style that he identified as post-impressionist. It was modeled upon that of Vincent Van Gogh and Maurice Vlaminck. He returned from Mexico to the United States in 1934 and set up a studio in Bay City.
Forrest Bess held his first exhibition in a Bay City hotel lobby in 1936. His one-man exhibition was organized at the Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Texas, in 1938. Besides, he was included in group show at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts the same year.
During the Second World War, he served with the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the camouflage division and received a commendation for his services. In 1946, while still in the Army, he suffered a mental breakdown. After spending some time in the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Antonio (now the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital) he obtained a job teaching painting.
A few years later, when his father's health was failing, Forrest Bess moved back to Bay City to manage the family bait camp in Chinquapin. He lived there for the rest of his life selling bait, building frames, designing visual aids for the public school, giving private art lessons, and occasionally selling his artworks.
In 1948 he travelled to New York City. There he met Betty Parsons, a prominent New York City gallery owner who represented leading Abstract Expressionist and Colour Field painters Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Parsons organized the first major exhibit of Bess's work in 1949. It was followed by shows in 1954, 1957, 1959, 1962, and 1967.
Critic Meyer Schapiro wrote an essay for the 1962 retrospective exhibition of his artworks at the Betty Parsons Gallery. His works were included in the Corcoran Gallery Biennial (1939), and he was also featured in one-man exhibitions at the Witte Museum in San Antonio (1938, 1967), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1951), the Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City (1951), the André Emmerich Gallery, Houston (1958), the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston(1962), and the New Arts Gallery, Houston (1963). Bess works were featured at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1958), and in 1962 some of his paintings were included in an exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts in New York titled "Wit and Whimsy in 20th Century Art".
During the 1960s his work attracted the attention of such Texas artists as Jim Love and Roy Fridge as well as sseveral collectors, including Dominique and John de Menil, Stanley Marcus, Nina Cullinan, Houston architect Howard Barnstone, and New York architect Philip Johnson. Bess's career waned after his last show at Parsons's gallery in 1967. In 1974 he suffered a mild stroke and was admitted to the San Antonio State Hospital. There the artist was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. Later that year he entered a nursing home in Bay City. At that time he ceased painting.
Views
Quotations:
"I term myself a visionary painter for lack of a better word. I can close my eyes in a dark room and if there is no outside noise or attraction, plus, if there is no conscious effort on my part - then I can see color, lines, patterns, and forms that make up my canvases. I have always copied these arrangements exactly without elaboration."
Personality
Forrest Bess was considered eccentric. Bess was never comfortable to be around other people for very long time, although he frequently hosted visitors in his home and studio at Chinquapin, including artists, reporters, and some patrons. But ultimately Forrest Bess preferred solitude, and his prolific activities as an artist alternated with longs spells of loneliness, depression, and an ever-increasing obsession with his own anatomical manifesto.
Forrest Bess was convinced that he was meant to be a hermaphrodite, and he committed a gruesome act of self-mutilation to attain that end. The events of the night in 1955 on which Forrest Bess became a pseudo-hermaphrodite are not clear. According to Forrest Bess, he paid a local physician, Dr. R. H. Jackson, $100 and several paintings to perform the necessary surgery. Sex researcher Dr. John Money later corresponded with Bess and concluded that the artist, who had an comprehensive knowledge of anatomy, medical procedures and painkilling drugs, had operated on himself and invented the doctor to legitimize his experiment.
However, the anatomical facts are clear. According to the aborigine ritual, an opening or fistula was created beneath Bess's penis at its junction with the scrotum. This opening led through an incision in the urethra to the bulbocavernous urethra, a naturally enlarged section of the urethra. Bess insisted it was capable of intense orgasmic stimulation. According to his theories, the bulbous section of the urethra could, if sufficiently widen, receive another penis in what would be the ultimate, eternally rejuvenating form of sexual intercourse. But this physical manifestation of his theory never achieved the results he had expected. Moreover, this quest for immortality was the beginning of a slow decline in both his health and his creative output.