Since 1981, when I first encountered and reviewed the art of Forrest Bess at the Whitney Museum, I have seen every Bess exhibition that I could. I contributed a catalog essay for a 1988 show at Hirschl & Adler that included 62 of the artist’s estimated 150 paintings, and have viewed and written about many other works in multiple shows around the United States. At this point, I did not expect to come across many paintings by Bess that I had not already seen.
This inspired me to visit the exhibition Jack was my first art collector.” Forrest Bess – From the Estate of Dr. Jack Weinberg at Franklin Parrasch Gallery. All 10 paintings in the exhibition are dated 1946, the year he began to incorporate his visions into his art — shapes he saw on the inside of his eyelids before waking up. The show consists of three still lifes of vegetables on a table, two abstractions populated by indecipherable symbols and objects on a black ground; and five postcard-sized paintings on wood, mostly of seascapes.
Other than the two abstractions, most of the paintings are undistinguished views that I didn’t find interesting. What held my attention was the way Bess painted them — the stippling, scratching through, and slathering of thick paint. The process appears direct and at times awkward, with tactile marks of addition and subtraction creating uneven surfaces.
One exceptional work in the show is a seascape with an inexplicable red symbol floating in the band of black sky that stretches across the top of the picture plane. Below it, against a blackish gray background, is a ladder-like green and yellow form that seems to sit atop the solid black ocean. In the painting’s foreground is a figure divided into black and white halves; a reddish-brown band circles the head, like a giant halo/lifesaver. Other shapes emerging from the ocean include a red cactus-like object and a blue crescent perched on a brown shape floating on the water.
Is the figure Bess’s divided self? His personal philosophies included a belief, informed by Aboriginal rituals, that becoming an intersex person would lead to eternal life. What are we to make of the black sea — does it represent the unconscious where visions appear in the utter darkness? Does the water signify that he is diving into this unconscious?
Bess believed that painting was a way to find the truth, which, for him, was everlasting life. His paintings are records of that search. After he made a connection between what he saw as a sexually divided self and Jung’s belief that the unification of opposites was the central obstacle alchemists faced in order to attain immortality, he searched for a way to reach this state. He believed he found the solution to his dilemma when he learned of an aboriginal ritual of passage involving genital surgery, which he attempted to perform unassisted in 1952. In 1960, adhering to the ritual, he hired a local physician, Dr. R. H. Jackson, to do the operation, but most likely performed it himself with the doctor in attendance. Bess’s conviction that art and life were inseparable is what most viewers find compelling, raw, and disturbing about his art.
In this and the two large paintings, Bess is on the cusp of becoming a visionary with a language of semaphoric symbols that are completely his, no matter their source. The collective unconscious, which he discovered through the work of alchemists, Jung, and an aboriginal Australian tribe, had opened up for him. The voices of these past figures, whose theories he had studied, began speaking to him about what steps had to be taken to unify his divided self and attain immortality.
Bess believed his body had become a conduit revealing his path to achieving unity. He did not “paint” his visions; without elaboration, he faithfully copied what he saw on the insides of his eyelids onto modest sized paintings. His preoccupation with identity presages today’s conversations about gender, sexuality, and identity. Looking to the past and different cultures, he was one of the first American artists to grapple with the many parts of an individual’s identity, and seek to unify them.
“Jack was my first art collector.” Forrest Bess – From the Estate of Dr. Jack Weinberg continues at Franklin Parrasch Gallery (19 East 66th Street, Lenox Hill, Manhattan) through January 31. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
