Forrest Bess @ Whitney Biennial

Whitney Museum of American Art
(Photo: Gryffindor/Wikimedia Commons)

A small selection of works by the American painter Forrest Bess (1911 - 1977) is now on show at the Whitney Biennial in New York through May 27.

Sanford Schwartz recently described Bess in The New York Review of Books as an independent loner making a living as a Texas-based commercial fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico, far afield from the New York art world.

A lack of repetition of any particular motifs in his seemingly unassuming small-scale works makes him stand out as an artist. Yet his paintings are hardly ever on view anymore in major museums or exhibitions. (FYI you will hit the NYR paywall before you can read the entire article on Bess by Schwartz, but even reading just the first few grafs is pretty interesting!)

Bess' paintings were based on his own inner life. Like Georgia O'Keefe when she sought out solitude in the vast open spaces of New Mexico, he lived out most of his life in a ramshackle cabin on a spit of land accessible only by boat.

"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." - Forrest Clemenger Bess (forrestbess.org)

What seems particularly intriguing about Bess, beyond his obviously eccentric existence, is that he cannot really be categorized with any particular group of artists or movement. Despite his odd lifestyle (which included self-mutilation in an attempt to become a hermaphrodite and seek eternal life), he seems particularly memorable for marching to the beat of his own drummer. His strange ways, however, could threaten at times to overshadow his increasingly obscure - yet critically acclaimed and oddly appealing - oeuvre.



As Michael H. Miller put it recently for GalleristNY: "The unclassifiable nature of his style has contributed to his mythical allure and slapped him with the problematic label of 'outsider.'"

The rare opportunity to see some of them sounds like yet another good reason to make a point of visiting Manhattan to check out the Whitney Biennial.

As recently cited by Christie's (where another Bess show closed earlier this month), the art historian Meyer Shapiro considered Bess "...that kind of artist rare at any time, a real visionary painter."

A selection of his works is on view here. Some more images by Bess are on view here.

The New York Times has also published a great Bess image gallery.

A revelation.