When I was in high school, I read an article in an art magazine (the name of the magazine eludes me today) about a Texas artist who suffered from a form of mental illness that caused him to attempt to surgically alter his genitalia so that he could become a hermaphrodite. That story stayed with me all of these years, but unfortunately, along the way, I forgot the name of the artist. I have searched on and off over the years to find the name of the Texan with the bizarre ideas of physical perfection. I finally tracked down his name and his story is no less wrenching and grotesque when I read about him as an adult, than it was when I was a teenager.
Forrest Clemenger Bess was born in Bay City, Texas in 1911. He came from a working class family that followed work in the oil fields through Texas and Oklahoma. He took art lessons when he was 13 years old from a neighbor in Corsicana, Texas. At age 18 Bess began college in what is now called Texas A & M University where he studied Architecture. He transferred to the University of Texas a couple of years into college to pursue Liberal Arts, including English literature, Greek Mythology, Hinduism and Psychology. Finally, he dropped out of college altogether in 1933. He worked as a roughneck in the Texas oilfields until he could save enough money to go to Mexico where he began to paint in the post-impressionist style for which he is famous. He returned to America and set up a studio in Bay City, Texas and he held his first exhibition in 1936 the lobby of a hotel. When WWII broke out, he served in the Army Corps of Engineers and received a commendation for his service. Suffering his first mental breakdown in 1946, he was treated in the VA Hospital in San Antonio, and eventually became an art instructor in that hospital.
Bess later returned to Bay City to run the family bait camp in Chinquapin when his father became ill. He exhibited his paintings throughout Texas, and during a trip to New York in 1948 he met Betty Parson, who agreed to exhibit his paintings in her New York gallery. Betty Parson also represented other leading artists of the day including: Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Some of his work is permanently exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and in the Menil Collection. Bess' paintings are projections of his dreams onto canvas. He kept dream notebooks and incorporated Jungian symbolism and philosophy into his artwork. He also developed a Theory of Hermaphroditism, in which he believed that the male and female forms would be perfected in the melding of the two into an androgynous being. His theory repulsed many, and was a detriment to his career as an artist. He felt that his dreams were visions and he painted the visions in simple symbols (eyes, crosses, crescents, etc…) with bold colors, geometric forms and lines. Bess felt that these representations of symbols were the key to ending human suffering. It was noted that he sometimes conjured his visions by pressing his thumbs into his eyelids and then painting what he saw.
In 1960 he performed self-surgery in an effort to achieve his androgynous ideal by carving a vagina into his perineum, and he suffered with the consequences of that surgery for the rest of his life. After suffering a stroke, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was later placed in The Bay Villa Nursing Home in Bay City, Texas, where he died in 1977. Books and articles have been written about him and a documentary titled, The Key to the Puzzle narrated by Willem Dafoe was made about his life in 1999.
The latest chapter in Bess’ odd story is that a collection of what may or may not be his paintings was auctioned on Ebay in May 2004 by the Matagorda County Museum in Bay City, Texas. The museum purchased the collection of 90 paintings around 1995 from a man who turns out to be a known associate of Forrest Bess, who also happens to be a known dealer of questionable art items. After having the paintings studied and appraised numerous times without definitively determining the validity or worth of the collection, it was decided by the Board of Directors that the collection would be shown a final time then auctioned off with the caveat of "Buyer Beware!"
Bibliography: Michael Ennis, "His Name was Forrest Bess," Texas Monthly, June 1982. Barbara Haskell, Forrest Bess (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981). John Money and Michael De Priest, "Three Cases of Genital Self-Surgery and Their Relationship to Transsexualism," Journal of Sex Research 12 (November 1976). Vertical Files, Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The World Wide Web at http://www.matagordacountymuseum.org/forrestbess.htm
This Thanksgiving we opted out. We didn't cook or invite people over. This picture is of me on Thanksgiving Day doing "the airplane" with Connor, like I have been doing with him since he was a baby. From the look of things, I won't have many more years of being able to lift him. This was the first year that he offered to "fly" me, so I took him up on it. His 10-year-old legs are not as strong as he thinks they are and the result was that his legs slowly collapsed under my weight and he pretty much begged for mercy. I win (sort of). After I crushed him, we went to Steak and Ale with the padres for some anti-turkey and we stopped by Caryn and Matt's for our one taste of a traditional Thanksgiving celebration, desert at their super-sized family Thanksgiving dinner. There were parents, sisters, cousins, kids - you name it. I got to taste Chess Pie for the first time and I got to take home a piece of my all time favorite - pecan pie. Caryn made a wonderful pecan pie, for which I heartily thank her! In addition to having a beautifully symmetric pie top with pecan halves laid out in perfect intervals, it was also exactly the right texture and the flavor was superb. Did I mention that I LOVE pecan pie?
I took the week off and spent it with my wonderful nephew, Connor. We talked, listened to music, read, and watched some B horror flicks (Night of the Living Dead and The Last Man on Earth). I find that the older he gets, the more I enjoy introducing him to relics and pop iconography from my youth. He's is an absolute sponge for whatever he is discovering,and he can relate almost anything back to an episode of The Simpsons. We listened to the classic rock cable station while we read and when The Who came on I was telling him about Roger Daltrey swinging his microphone and Pete Townshend smashing his guitar and he got excited and said, "Hey, these guys were on The Simpsons when they divided the town!" He also recognized Paul McCartney from the vegetarian episode. I never really thought of how that show is the equivalent of the History Channel for the Y Generation.
This week I am reading My Movie Business, John Irving's memoir about the development of the screenplay for The Cider House Rules. He begins by discussing his grandfather, Dr. Frank Irving, a well known Obstetrician whose austere personality influenced the character of Dr. Larch in the The Cider House Rules. In this book, he explains changes in the storyline, why he added some new characters and why he left some characters out. Irving describes the artistic process of developing a screenplay from the novel and discusses the method he used to decide what in the novel he could alter to make a good movie, but still keep the essence of his story intact.
This week I finished Douglas Coupland's novel Girlfriend in a Coma. I like Coupland's books because I relate to the characters. It's not so much what the characters do, but rather their perspective and some of the thoughts (maybe neurosis) that motivate them. His characters are about my age, so I get the cultural references and I like the humor in his writing (a little warped).I am an X'er for better or worse.
A lot of negative things have been written about Generation X since Coupland made the term famous/infamous in his book by that name. For years it seemed like the media was labeling X'ers as complaining, underemployed, slackers. I took issue with that aspect of the label at the time the book came out, because I was a degreed and disillusioned waitress. I liked that we were thought to be rejecting Boomer values as they had evolved in the 80's, but I knew that we weren't the slothful ingrates portrayed in the media.
What many people misunderstood about X’ers was that underemployment was not our first choice for how to support ourselves. We were caught in the employment vacuum caused by the failing economy of the times and the huge number of Baby Boomers that preceded us. Disillusionment and mistrust of government came naturally to all of us whose childhood was colored by Watergate, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and spreading world terrorism. It's not that bad things didn't happen during the childhoods of previous generations; it's just that Gen X not only got the story, we got the accompanying visual aids via the nightly news. The Boomer's had the threat of nuclear war when they were kids, but they got the "duck and cover" version, in which they were given the hope (however misguided it was) that hiding under their desks in their classrooms would save them from the impending doom of the Russians' attack. X'ers didn't get the candy coated version of that scenario; ours was the scorched Earth/nuclear Winter adaptation. Some think us to be whiners, but I don't believe that to be the case. I believe it is just that our outlook was affected by having the world's ugliest truths paraded before our eyes night after night during our formative years. Continued exposure to the worst that mankind has to offer inevitably causes a change in how people view the world and themselves. This is something that previous generations experienced to a lesser degree than Gen X children, but children today experience far more than even we did. That said, I think that as a group we are somewhat cynical, but not completely without hope; and my hope for those who come after us is that they remain hopeful in spite of what they will bear witness to as children.
As for the book, I enjoyed it, as I do all of Coupland's books. His stories make me slow down and think about my world and my place in the world, which seems to be one of the themes running through Girlfriend in a Coma. The book leaves me feeling a tinge of nostalgia for the days that come back to me in memories like faded Kodak snapshots.
