Art Historian, Cyle Metzger: Forrest Bess was dedicated to his inquiry into gender and the dissolution of boundaries between male and female, which as a trans person, spoke to me.
My name is Cyle Metzger, and I’m an art historian.
Bess was born in 1911 in Bay City, Texas. In 1941, he enlisted in the military. He was beaten into a coma by another military service person. This sparked the visions that he’d had since he was a child to become much more pronounced. And so he made his abstract paintings in an effort to decode those visions. He wanted to define what these colors and shapes meant.
Looking to Number 40—the right two thirds of this painting is a soft yellow, and the color yellow, he’s associated with spiritual liberation. The blue and the white coiling together for Bess was the union of two parts of himself—the union of male and female, to produce the liberation that he was after. And then we jump to the other side of the painting that has a hatched arc that suggests suture. For him, the unification of male and female was also a matter of his own physical transformation.
I think Bess is anticipating a moment that we’re arriving closer and closer to now, hopefully, wherein intersex medicine and transness itself is not about making bodies clearly male or female but recognizing this notion of gender being an abstraction that is applied to our bodies.