Installation shot of “Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible”
Forrest Bess already had the reputation of an eccentric, so it didn’t surprise the locals in the diner in Wadsworth, Texas, when he rushed in one day in 1953 shouting and waving a letter. “He wrote back to me! He wrote back to me!” Bess exclaimed, skipping from table to table. The letter was from Carl Jung, and it was the first of six exchanges by the artist and the famous psychiatrist. That the two became correspondents is just one of the many curious aspects of this most curious artist.
From his isolated bait shack outside of Bay City, Texas, Bess (1911–1977) painted small canvases that explored a complex system of personal symbolism culled from his nightly hypnagogic visions. Complementing his visions were ideas encountered from years of reading and research on Greek mythology, Hinduism, Buddhism, psychiatry, mysticism, alchemy, and anthropology. This unguided scholarship led to radical ideas about sexuality and anatomy, leading Bess to believe that the key to eternal life lay in becoming a hermaphrodite—an obsession that became so extreme that he attempted surgery on himself. All this combined to have a profound impact on his art.
His musings on speculative philosophies and immortality form a counterpoint to life as a fisherman: setting lines, selling bait, navigating Bay waters, and returning home for a pile of boiled shrimp, a beer, and a pipe. This sense of place is evident in Bess’s Gulf Coast palette: the blanched