Forrest Bess
Untitled
1946
Oil on canvas
4 x 5 in; 10.1 x 12.7 cm
Image courtesy of Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Forrest Bess (1911-1977, Bay City, Texas) was an American painter known for his small-scale, abstract paintings informed by the “visions” that appeared in his liminal sleep-wake states. After traveling to Mexico and working for the US military as a camouflage designer and bricklayer, Bess worked in seclusion on the Gulf as a commercial bait fisherman while maintaining a dedicated painting practice.
This work is from 1946, the first year that Bess starting painting his visions and was originally given to Dr. Jack Weinberg, Bess’ psychiatrist and first collector. Attempting to express a unification of opposites, here in the painting represented by the figure made of equal black and white parts, Bess was influenced by medieval alchemy, Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, kundalini awakening, and Australian aboriginal culture, particularly the ritual of penile subincision, which Bess found to open a portal to the divine, explained in various correspondence, and which he eventually performed on himself. As artist Richard Hawkins writes, “[t]o Bess, this was the location for the body to be transformed into spirit, a hermaphrodizing orifice, and it lay on that other side, the underside of the perineum, and literally the realm of the artist’s ‘Shadow’ – Jung’s term for everything outside the light of conscious awareness.”
Bess maintained an extensive correspondence with art historian Meyer Schapiro, and it is interesting to note Bess’ understanding of art history and intentional anti-intellectualism, which precludes him from being characterized as an “outsider artist”:
I have been thinking a lot about the statement concerning intellectualization creeping into painting. In my own particular case, I actually don’t see how it can happen. As I told you about Klee, I am sure that given the opportunity, I could go through his work and pick out what was real and what were variations and intellectual concoctions. The trouble with Klee was that he was afraid to search – afraid to relax – afraid to abandon and discard values which really do not matter. When he painted a true vision he painted beautifully but unfortunately I believe he wanted to be a great man so he marked time with concoctions. This is no condemnation of the man or his work it is merely an observation. I feel the non-objective school of thinking possesses these same values – which are of no great value to me.
If I felt wholly responsible for my work as the creator of art surely does then perhaps I should have a worry but being in the position of a purely a means or conduit or instrument through which the visions happen, then I can’t claim much credit. And finding the vision more satisfying than I consciously could create or concoct, then I have no alternative other than to copy them literally but even that act is no easy job. I still have the ability to make a jackass out of myself and an “almost got there” to me is not the truth.
Several other works from the 1940s are held by the Phillips Collection. In his travels to New York, Bess met Betty Parsons who would become his gallerist. He wrote to Parsons in 1949, “painting is of the spirit not the mind – and that is why it is close to religion or resembles religion.” Parsons dedicated a number of solo exhibitions to Bess’ work from 1950 through 1967.
Provenance
Dr. Jack Weinberg
Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Exhibitions
“Jack was my first art collector.” Forrest Bess – From the Estate of Dr. Jack Weinberg, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, December 12, 2024 – February 1, 2025
See also
Correspondence of Forrest Bess in the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art
Forrest Bess in the collection of the MoMA
Forrest Bess in the Phillips Collection
Forrest Bess in the collection of SFMOMA
Forrest Bess in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art
“Richard Hawkins, the Forrest Bess Variations,” Greene Naftali, New York, March 11 – April 23, 2022
Fridericianum, “Forest Bess,” February 16 – September 6, 2020
“Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible,” the Menil Collection, April 19 – August 18, 2013
Richard Hawkins, “When Forrest Bess Wrote to Carl Jung,” Frieze, June 3, 2022
John Yau, “The Divided Being of Forrest Bess,” Hyperallergic, January 21, 2025