Artist Profile: Forrest Bess

Summary

There has always been a fine line or careful balance between an artist’s aesthetic and their personal biography. While many art historians either encourage or avoid psychoanalytic theory, artists such as Forrest Bess emphasized the importance of it in his work, and insisted that the painting and the personal could not be separated from one another.

Background

During the mid-1900s, abstract expressionists were balancing unconscious automatism and careful visual reproduction. However, Bess—straying slightly from this—made an extremely clear case for his uncovering of a “universal truth,” stating to artists and gallerists alike that his works were not so much artistic endeavors and interpretations; his original visions took precedence over aesthetic concerns.

An abstract painting using light and dark. Background is white on top, black on bottom with 4 peaks. There are 8 totem-style motifs split in


Forrest Bess’s Before Man (1952-53) is one of many paintings that rely on the artist’s own “Basic Primordial Symbolism,” a collection of repeated artistic symbols employed in his paintings and their unique meanings and relationships with one another—symbols that he believed would help access pure, universal truths. These symbols came to Bess in unprompted moments throughout his life. You can find a selection of symbols and their meanings in Before Man in this image:  Basic Primordial Symbolism in Before Man by artist Forrest Bess

 

The title of the work purchased by Roy R. Neuberger in 1978—the year following Bess’s death—speaks to what Bess passionately sought to uncover and elaborate on; for the artist, the balance of maleness and femaleness within oneself “was the key to regeneration and eternal life,” and something that had existed since the beginning of time. It was Bess who enacted a procedure on himself, manipulating his body medically to achieve this.

During his artistic career, Bess longed to show both his artwork and his “thesis” side-by-side, along with serious correspondence with historians, philosophers, and psychologists. Gallerists such as Betty Parsons were hesitant to incorporate these materials and context, and wished to focus on the formal elements for various reasons at the time. It was not until the exhibition Seeing Things Invisible came to fruition that Bess’s oeuvre was able to truly coexist with his thesis. The Neuberger Museum of Art displayed this traveling exhibition in 2014.

Approximately ten years after the completion of Before Man, Bess said: “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see.” Whether the artist saw this as either being ahead of his time, or as a literal prophesy, it still rings true. Now, more than ever, we see artists on a global scale looking within to come to terms with their unique, self-defined identity, and its place in the human experience.

 

Rem Ribeiro
Curatorial Assistant
Neuberger Museum of Art

Date

July 3, 2024