In a 1948 letter to art critic Meyer Schapiro, Forrest Bess introduced himself as a “painter-fisherman.” Over the course of their correspondence (as well as in an exchange with art dealer Betty Parsons), Bess detailed the elaborate system of symbols encoded in his art. While the shoreline landscape of Chinquapin Bay in Texas, where he lived, figures vividly in his paintings, the symbolism expresses a different aspect of nature—his theories on sexuality, particularly a belief in hermaphroditism as a transcendent union of opposites. (The letters also recount—with photographic evidence—an attempt to achieve this state via self-surgery.) The ideation and impulse to create followed from trauma. During World War II, Bess was beaten by a fellow soldier after revealing his homosexuality. He then suffered a nervous breakdown, and a psychiatrist suggested that Bess paint his troubling visions. After discharge from the service, he set up a studio by the water and devoted himself to reading, fishing, selling bait, and making art. The small, meticulously conceived canvases he produced from the mid-1940s until the early ’70s reveal a purposeful intelligence. From the approximately one hundred known paintings, this catalogue for a show currently at SUNY Purchase’s Neuberger Museum of Art presents many significant pieces. The shapes that migrate and mutate from one piece to another were defined in a primer he drew up. Some, such as a bladelike triangle, are comprehensible as “to cut deep”; other correspondences, like “herringbone, feather design, shaft of wheat, bulbocavernous, inner penis,” less so. These archetypal figures are often set in dynamic relation to landscape—sea and sky forming the backdrop for a deeply interior drama. No surprise, then, that Bess found kinship with van Gogh. The 1946 painting Dedication to Van Gogh (above) offers a bright yet tumultuous sky in which an improbable sun lowers into a vibratory maze. Like many of Bess’s paintings, this one splits along a horizontal line—marking a division between, perhaps, the waking world and the realm of visions, or ascent and descent, or the penis (“herringbone”) and the circle (“hole”). Speculative dualities abound, but key for Bess is the underlying visual grammar—the union of these opposites, the picture frame serving as a domain in which the disparate becomes one. Bess seems not to have drafted his perplexingly dense images, but rather to have retrieved them whole from somewhere inside his body.
