Forrest Bess has works in the collection Whitney Museum of American Art
Legacy
In the years following his death, Bess was nearly forgotten to history, but a 1981 solo show curated by Barbara Haskell at the Whitney Museum of Art helped revive his reputation as an artist. In the catalog, Haskell wrote, "Indeed, this painter's direct, almost primitive images, loaded with symbolic meaning and emotional content, are finding echoes in the so-called New Image painters. It may be that the show at the Whitney is the first step toward readdressing the import of his work." Bess's legacy was further enhanced in 1988, when Hirschl & Adler Modern exhibited 61 of his works.In 1999, an award-winning 48 minute documentary film, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle, was produced by Chuck Smith and directed by Chuck Smith and Ari Marcopoulos. The film features interviews with Meyer Schapiro, Robert Thurman, and other friends and artists who knew Bess. In 2013, Smith turned the film into a book, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle, published by powerHouse Books. The book features a foreword by Robert Thurman.
As part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, sculptor Robert Gober curated an exhibition of Bess' paintings from the late 1950s, as well as archival material.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.Today, 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. His best art consists of only about 100 small paintings, many with simple driftwood frames that he built himself. The majority of these paintings are in private collections, although the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the City by the Sea Museum in Palacios, Texas have Bess paintings in their collections.
holds works in the collection