Forrest Bess by Chuck Smith,Robert Thurman

Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite-Forrest Bess lived his lifestyles in obscurity at an remoted bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 via 1967, Bess confirmed on the Betty Parsons Gallery in long island urban, along celebrity artists comparable to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his loss of life in 1977, Bess's small visionary work are actually prized by means of museums and creditors for his or her primal good looks, and will fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's valuable canvases have been merely a part of a grander theory-based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals-that proposed that hermaphrodism used to be the foremost to immortality. As an artist, Bess may well by no means equivocate, and in 1960 he underwent an operation to turn into a pseudo-hermaphrodite. For the 1st time ever in print, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle combines the great thing about Bess's paintings with the drama and tragedy of his own lifestyles. utilizing Bess's personal hauntingly honest phrases (in letters to Betty Parsons, Meyer Schapiro, and others) the e-book strains the lifestyles and common sense of this forgotten artist and explains how a love of attractiveness and a wish for wholeness lead Bess to self-surgery and, finally, a psychological medical institution. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is an interesting examine certainly one of America's so much infamous cult visionaries-a guy who actually believed that paintings may perhaps shop his life.