Forrest Bess

Self-taught artist Forrest Bess developed a richly symbolic, quasi-abstract language in his small oil paintings. Bess was inspired by his research into Jungian theories and sexology as well as his own hallucinatory visions. Born in Bay City, Texas, Bess began painting figurative and abstract works in the mid-1930s. During his enlistment in World War II, he suffered a beating, and subsequent breakdown, after revealing his homosexuality. After the war, Bess began painting works inspired by his inner visions. He showed with the gallerist Betty Parsons, renowned for her Abstract Expressionist stable, from 1949 to 1967. Based on his own research into Aboriginal rituals, Bess underwent surgeries to achieve a pseudo-hermaphroditic state. His “medical thesis” notebooks—a scrapbook of dreams, psychoanalytic theories, and religious screeds—were shown alongside his paintings at the 2012 Whitney Biennial in a display curated by artist Robert Gober. Represented in prestigious museum collections, Bess’s work has also been exhibited in solo shows organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (1962), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1981), the Museum Ludwig (1989), and the Menil Collection (2013).