Forrest Clemenger Bess was an American painter and fisherman.
14 Facts About Forrest Bess
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Forrest Bess was discovered and promoted by the art dealer Betty Parsons.
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Forrest Bess first experienced the "visions" he would use later in his art as a young child.
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Forrest Bess returned to Bay City in 1934 to establish a painting studio.
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Forrest Bess suffered a psychological breakdown, took a leave of absence, and then transferred to teaching painting at a convalescent hospital.
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Forrest Bess worked as a commercial fisherman, but painted in his spare time.
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Forrest Bess experienced visions or dreams, which he set down in his paintings.
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Forrest Bess began to exhibit his works, earning one-person shows at museums in San Antonio and Houston.
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Forrest Bess was never able to win any converts to his theories or validation from the many doctors and psychologists with whom he corresponded.
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The events of the night in 1955 or the "late 1950s" on which Forrest Bess became a pseudo-hermaphrodite are not clear.
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Sex researcher Dr John Money later corresponded at length with Forrest Bess and concluded that Forrest Bess, who exhibited an extensive knowledge of anatomy, medical procedures and painkilling drugs, had operated on himself and invented the doctor's participation to legitimize his experiment.
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Forrest Bess died on November 11,1977, in a Bay City, Texas nursing home from a stroke at the age of 66.
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In 2013 and 2014, the museum retrospective "Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible" exhibited nearly 50 of his paintings and was curated by Clare Elliott, assistant curator of the Menil Collection.
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Today, Forrest Bess is regarded as a unique phenomenon, an artist who cannot be grouped with any one school, but who answered solely and completely to his own vivid, personal vision.