Forrest Bess: A Fisherman Artist’s Spiritual Abstraction

On the occasion of the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, we spoke with art historian Cyle Metzger about Forrest Bess, an artist central to Metzger’s work on the trans history of art in the United States. Metzger discusses Bess’s mysterious paintings and their symbolic meanings, which emerge in the artist’s profuse writings about gender and liberation, offering a striking vision of how to unite ideas of abstraction and the body.

I found Forrest Bess to be somebody who was incredibly curious and incredibly dedicated to the questions that he was after. He was dedicated specifically to the dissolution of boundaries between male and female genders, which as a trans person spoke to me from the very beginning of my relationship with his work. I encountered Bess while working on another artist in this show, Greer Lankton, for my dissertation on trans history in art in the US after World War II. I was in the process of looking for artists before Lankton who would fit under the “trans” umbrella, and this was actually kind of hard at first. That’s because one of the tricky things about trans history in American art, and elsewhere, frankly, is that terminology changes so frequently that people we might now call trans were not called trans then. They can become hidden in the archives without a capacious set of terms to guide searches. Once Bess came on my radar, I went to the Archives of American Art and spent a good amount of time looking through Bess’s papers and letters and all of the things that he wrote in relation to his paintings. I was really flabbergasted by his dedication to his investment in the dissolution of male and female genders. And also I was really touched by the biographical nuances and subtleties of his story.

Bess was born in 1911 in Bay City, Texas. He started making art as a child. After high school he applied to West Point, but said that a curvature in his spine kept him from being accepted, so instead he went to Texas A&M and eventually transferred to the University of Texas, where he studied architecture as a sort of compromise with his parents, since he’d rather have studied art. (I spent a summer at Texas A&M, and the arid, flat expanse helped me understand where the open space in his paintings was taken from.) Bess wound up dropping out in 1932. Largely, I imagine, because he preferred to spend time browsing the library stacks than going to any of his formal classes; that kind of top-down educational environment didn’t suit him. In 1934, he traveled to Mexico for a short stint. He went to Mexico a number of times throughout his life, and that first visit introduced him to the Mexican Muralists, folks like Diego Rivera, and then his return to the US prompted him to paint in ways that were influenced or inspired or motivated by the style and formal approach that he saw with the Mexican Muralists, but also artists like Vincent van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

In 1941, the US had just entered World War II, and Bess enlisted. One of his primary jobs early on, like many artists, was to make camouflage. He became a bricklayer once the war started to wane, and he continued serving the military in this way until his breakdown. He does not talk very much about what that breakdown was caused by, but one set of letters indicates that it was essentially a gay bashing. He was beaten into a coma by another military service person. It’s not totally clear to me, from the archive, whether or not he had come on to this person or if this person had some other motivation or some other reason. But this beating sparked a lot of the visions that he’d had since he was a child to become much more elaborate, much more pronounced. He had always been someone who had what some scholars call “hallucinations,” but Bess called them visions, visions that he didn’t always understand himself, and so he made his abstract paintings in an effort to decode them for himself or come up with the language or the logic or the ideas that he thought were trying to come to him through these colors and forms.

Photograph of Forrest Bess, c. 1955

Forrest Bess. Untitled. 1957. Oil on canvas with wood frame

After the war, he was a bait fisherman, living hand-to-mouth at his family’s coastal camp. He really had very limited resources. A lot of his paintings are on pieces of something that’s similar to a thin plywood, with the frames constructed from pieces of wood that he collected. He was also constantly writing letters asking his patrons and supporters—the handful that he had—for resources and money to buy paint and supplies to make his paintings, especially after Hurricane Carla, in 1961, wiped out his camp and ruined most of the works that were there with him. He would have visions when he was sleeping or resting, or even some of them are waking visions, that he would say “nag at me.” And he would draw them on little slips of paper and then eventually translate them into paintings. He said that he didn’t actually decipher the meanings of these paintings until after they were complete. So he was in conversation with the paintings and he was really looking to the painting to reveal what was in his own mind.

A lot of those insights were expressed in letters that he wrote to art historian and critic Meyer Shapiro. He cold-called Shapiro after reading his article about the relationship between abstraction and spiritual practices. Bess took that as an indication that he might find in Shapiro someone who was just as invested in the spiritual aspects of abstraction as he was, and someone who was interested in more than just talk about formalism. He wrote a series of letters over 10 years. These letters go on and on and on about all of his ideas about the inner psyche. He read Carl Jung quite a bit. He didn’t necessarily always agree with Jung but thought that he was picking up where Jung left off. He also would read scientific journals by doctors who were thinking about ways to transform or deal with issues and problems with the urinary tract, or who would do surgical procedures to try to stop the flow of semen out of animals in order to find some way to prolong their lives. This is a time in American history where medicine and science were really defining for American culture. Medicine was this new frontier of human possibility, and Bess found that to be truly inspirational, especially because he was also invested and really intrigued by the writings of early sexologists, like Havelock Ellis, who in the late 19th century developed the study of sexology for the first time—at least in the way that we know it now in Western medicinal practice. Bess was invested in bringing all of these different approaches and different practices together to a kind of scientific truthfulness.

And so he wound up trying to reach out to all these different people to tell them how important this work was. At one point he wrote to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to say, and I paraphrase, “This research that I’m doing, bringing all of these threads together, really is producing a way to bring liberation to an individual, and that the liberation of all individuals is the key to world peace.” In this letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, he was saying (paraphrasing again), “I’ve found the key to world peace.”

Forrest Bess. Number 40. 1949. Oil on canvas with wood frame

Unfortunately, Bess was not met by his peers with the same excitement that he had for his work. He was really, I think, disappointed to find that the other abstract artists that he met didn’t care about his ideas or his theories or about the power of abstraction to elevate human consciousness or to perform or manifest some sort of spiritual liberation. There’s one story in his archive that describes going to the bar where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hung out. The Cedar Bar, I believe. Bess was excited about having a conversation with them about the potential for abstraction and what it could do for humanity. He went there with all of this anticipation only to find that he was laughed at and cast aside. Part of that was described as because of his thick Texas accent, so of course there’s some classism and regional judgment happening there. But he was not, for the most part, understood in the ways that I think he wanted to be understood, and that also carried into the gallerists and the art historians and critics that he met and corresponded with. He was disappointed to see a letter from Meyer Shapiro come back and just say something like, “I really respect your work and appreciate your work, but I’m afraid I don’t really buy your theories.”

Bess ascribed a number of meanings to the paintings after they were completed. In the painting Number 40, he associated the color yellow with spiritual liberation from the restraints and difficulties that he experienced as a person in human form. This is the result of unifying male and female in his own body, in his cosmology. Yellow is the base foundation that is invested in spiritual liberation. If we look at the right edge of his painting, at the very far edge you’ll see a stitch, or what I’m calling a stitch. It really makes me think about my own scars from chest surgery and the interest that Bess had in using his own body as a site of experimentation. For him, the unification of male and female was a matter of his own material form. He became invested in developing methods for uniting the male and female through transformation of the body, and he used his own flesh as a site. I read this apparent stitch as a potential anticipation of or nod to the importance of physical transformation to this spiritual idea that he was developing.

I think Bess was anticipating a moment that we’re arriving closer and closer to now, hopefully, wherein intersex healthcare and transness itself is not about necessarily making bodies clearly male or female, but recognizing this notion of gender being an abstraction that is applied to a thing that exists. Although Bess was not received as he wanted to be in his moment, I think, I hope, that contemporary reception of his work is getting there. I really must clarify with this increased attention on Bess and my placing him within a trans history of art.

Bess himself rejected the notion of himself as a transsexual. My putting Bess within a project that is dedicated to transgender history in American art is recognizing that Bess’s work engages with materials that constitute trans history, and therefore the work is operating within trans history and American art, not so much Bess himself, which I think is really important to distinguish. Because the language around gender and transness and queer language and culture shifts very quickly, we can’t know how Bess would’ve positioned himself in relation to our contemporary structures and ways of describing gender. He also saw his repressed homosexuality linked to his exploration of gender, so there’s much to speculate on there that doesn’t neatly equate to him being a trans subject.

Bess’s methods are certainly questionable from a healthcare perspective and his investment in science as a legitimizing force has some undeniable echoes of the language of eugenics in his pursuit of “supreme” human embodiment. Yet, I think there are also elements of his thinking that are emerging in our contemporary frameworks of gender and identity. The trouble of his methods and ideas notwithstanding, there’s something really lovely about seeing things that he was thinking about coming to some sort of fruition or a related fruition, with nonbinary folks becoming much more prevalent and discourses around pronouns that aren’t necessarily grammatically correct, and this notion of a plural being a representation of a singular, and the more complicated approaches to gender that we’re seeing emerge from trans and queer communities, despite the intense pushback that we’re also seeing. I hope that people who view his work find something very present, even though his work and these objects that we’re looking at are pushing 75 years old. I do hope that there’s room for people to connect with Bess’s work in the contemporary moment while also remembering the context he was working in, the way that abstraction was, in many ways, a strategy for him to make himself visible in a world that didn’t want to see him or didn’t want to see his ideas brought into the light.

—As told to Arlette Hernandez, and edited for clarity and length.

Forrest Bess on a boat, c. 1951

Cyle Metzger is an assistant professor of art history at Bradley University, and the author of the forthcoming book Deep Cuts: Transgender History in American Art After World War II.

Vital Signs: Artists and the Body is on view at MoMA through February 22, 2025.