ChristieÃs Images, Ltd.“Chinquapin, 1967” by Forrest Bess shows how he was influenced by his surroundings on the Gulf of Mexico.
The art of Forrest Bess (1911-77), like that of Vincent van Gogh, may be in danger of being overtaken by his life story. Especially now, when the work of this eccentric visionary painter — who spent the bulk of his maturity as a fisherman on the Gulf of Mexico, living on a spit of Texas beach — is having an especially intense New York moment.
The current Whitney Biennial includes a show within a show of 11 Bess paintings, organized by the sculptor Robert Gober; it proffers Bess as a kind of foundational artist of our time. And an additional 40 of his paintings can be seen in “A Tribute to Forrest Bess,” an exhibition at Christie’s that is occasioned by a private sale of those works for a single seller. (It makes for the rather uneasy sight of an auction house acting like a commercial gallery handling what is tantamount to an artist’s estate.)
The facts of Bess’s life are nothing if not sensational. They include isolation, poverty, recurring visions — Bess said that he merely copied motifs that had appeared to him in dreams since childhood — and even self-mutilation. In the late 1950s, convinced that uniting the male and female sides of his personality would guarantee immortality, Bess attempted to turn himself into what he called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” through two acts of painful self-surgery that yielded a small vaginalike opening at the base of his penis.
