Art Forum

2022-02-01

Even now, more than forty years after his death and some seventy years after his first exhibition at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery, no one really knows what to make of Forrest Bess. The alluring legend of the visionary fisherman painter from Bay City, Texas, always threatens to overshadow his intense and quite inward art...

HYPERALLERGIC

2021-12-02

Everything about the painter Forrest Bess’s life was implausible, from recording his glimpses of immortality in paint, while living in a bait camp in Chinquapin, Texas, to having an extensive correspondence with the art historian Meyer Schapiro, to showing with Betty Parsons and meeting Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman, who was 19 at the time, to having his work shown in a refurbished barn in Montauk. Visionaries live in a universe that might resemble ours, but only in the flimsiest of ways, and the fantastical quality of that exalted domain can sometimes leak into ours, causing incredulity.