Forrest Clemenger Bess

Rain of Color 3, by Forrest Bess,
not dated, oil on canvas

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