“Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible,” on display at the Menil Collection in Houston, contains two shows. One presents Bess’ paintings, the other presents the biographical residue of his life. The approach contains a challenging paradox: While Bess’ seemingly simple paintings are primed to find new fans, the portrait of their maker makes the paintings difficult to look at.
The Menil Collection’s Clare Elliott curated the careful selection of paintings by Bess, a Bay City bait fisherman who in the 1950s and ’60s showed his work through the prestigious Betty Parsons Gallery in New York (Parsons’ gallery also represented Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko). The show’s biographical component is an installation by artist Robert Gober, originally created for the 2012 Whitney Biennial as part of the similarly conceived Bess retrospective “The Man that Got Away.” Gober’s contribution consists of three display-case vitrines filled with documents and ephemera relating to Bess—a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and self-created “pseudo hermaphrodite” who devised elaborate theories about gender unification. The letters, books, journals, magazines and photos collected by Gober explore—often graphically—the impulses and ideas behind the work on the walls. They also unintentionally raise questions about the line between explication and exploitation.
Bess was born in Bay City in 1911. As a child Bess took a few art lessons from a neighbor, but he was largely self-taught as a painter. Salutatorian of his high school class, Bess briefly studied architecture at Texas A&M University. Architecture was a compromise; he had wanted to study art, which his parents apparently deemed too feminine a pursuit. Bess transferred to the University of Texas after a couple of years, and though he never received a degree, he read widely in school: philosophy, mythology, mathematics and psychology all interested him. After leaving UT, Bess worked in the oil fields for a few years, making occasional trips to Mexico and, according to one account, watching Mexican muralists including David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera at work. When World War II commenced, Bess enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers. There he designed camouflage and eventually reached the rank of captain.
Source: Forrest Bess: An Artist Laid Bare – The Texas Observer