Forrest Bess: Out Of The Blue – Camden Art Centre, London

A review of Forrest Bess: Out of the Blue, on at the Camden Art Centre. A captivating (and free) exhibition of work by an artist who straddled the boundary between art world insider and outsider.

An Outing To The Camden Art Centre

I don’t remember where I came across this exhibition. It might have been on the very good Galleries Now website, which is where I find out what’s on outside my usual repertoire. In any case, this was my first visit here. When I heard Camden Art Centre I expected it to be around Camden Town somewhere. I was forgetting what a big borough Camden is. The closest station is actually Finchley Road (or Finchley Road & Frognal on the Overground). It’s therefore not too far from the Freud Museum near Hampstead Heath.

The Camden Art Centre seems like a great community asset. The building was once a library, dating to 1897. It just about survived WWII, but was done in by modernisation. The library itself moved to a new facility in the 1960s. It reopened first as Hampstead Arts Centre then as Camden Arts Centre (the ‘s’ was dropped in 2020), with a focus on exhibitions and community art classes. A major refurbishment happened in 2004, and today the Centre continues to engage in exhibitions, learning, and community programmes in person and online.

When I visited on a brisk, showery Sunday, there was a workshop going on upstairs. In the cafe there was a mix of exhibition visitors discussing what they had seen, workshop participants/facilitators on a break, and locals who like it as a nice lunch spot. There were even a few brave souls out in the garden. I had the sense of a vibrant and welcoming space, and look forward to keeping an eye on their programming in 2023 and beyond.

Forrest Bess: Out Of The Blue

But back to the matter at hand. I was here to see Forrest Bess: Out of the Blue. I love discovering artists who are new to me – see this or this recent example. And Forrest Bess was another name I was hitherto unfamiliar with. Bess was an American artist, born in 1911 in Texas. He lived most of his life on Chinquapin Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, and called himself an ‘artist-fisherman’. Although he attended university for a time and studied architecture, I haven’t seen any reference to formal art training.

Bess worked in paint, mostly oil on canvas, and his works were highly personal. He depicted visions that he had before falling asleep. He studied a variety of subjects (including mythology, Aboriginal beliefs and alchemy) in order to make better sense of his own unconscious. Bess was particularly drawn to the work of Carl Jung, and wrote to Jung several times (Jung’s assistants wrote back to say he was by that point too old to get into such detailed letters, perhaps a convenient excuse).

This life story, and the sometimes naive presentation of Bess’s works (framed in driftwood he collected) belie his art world status. For Bess was not an outsider artist. His New York gallerist, Betty Parsons, also represented the likes of Mark Rothko. His work featured regularly in exhibitions, and he was fairly successful for an ‘artist-fisherman’. Today, the loans for this exhibition come from private collections but also the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection and museums in multiple countries. It’s a really interesting line to have walked – comfortable with the art world ‘elite’ but withdrawing back to a fishing shack on the Gulf of Mexico.

Insider/Outsider

The other reason that Bess comes across as such an interesting blend of art world insider and outsider is that he had some very unusual ideas. His ‘thesis’, as he called it, centred on the idea that some sort of hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. That’s what he wrote long letters to Jung about, as well as to any number of friends and experts. Bess self-identified as a ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’ and undertook multiple surgeries, some performed himself, to achieve this state.

Bess’s dream was to see his paintings and thesis exhibited side by side, against a pure black background. For the first time, the Camden Art Centre has achieved this. About 50 works hang on black walls, with central vitrines displaying archival materials that explain Bess as a person and artist, culminating in the detail of his thesis. Although the ideas behind the thesis are far outside the mainstream, the presentation is compassionate and non-judgemental, often letting Bess explain his ideas in his own words. His letters to various correspondents are interesting, and it’s worth taking the time to read them in detail.

Overall this is a really fascinating exhibition and well worth a visit to Camden/Hampstead. Reintroducing an artist and his work, outlining his unusual thesis and fulfilling his wish in how he wanted his work to be viewed is a tall order for a two-room exhibition. And yet I think all aims are achieved. If you have an interest in mid-century American art then Forrest Bess: Out of the Blue provides a nice counterpoint to the well-known big name artists. He sounds like an interesting person to have known – widely read, independent in thought, and articulate both in words and on canvas.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 4.5/5

Forrest Bess: Out of the Blue on until 15 January 2023