a. SQUIRE is proud to present a single canvas by Forrest Bess, Trees in Snow (1946), one of the artist’s earliest surviving “visionary” paintings. Belying its small scale, the work reveals the first glimmers of the abstract glyphs by which Bess is known and so marks a pivotal moment in his (re-)orientation toward the unconscious mind: a sign of the self-searching in paint to come. It has remained in the same family since the late ’40s and is shown here for the first time since Bess’s 1962 mid-career survey at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
In 1934, Forrest Bess experienced his first adulthood visions. Eidetic, unmooring, and often elusive, they set forth his imagery and thus recast him, in his word, as a “conduit.” He showed oil renditions of them in his earliest solo exhibition, held in the lobby of the BayTex, a local Bay City hotel, in 1936. The cold reception drove him to abandon abstract forms in favour of a parallel figurative mode, and for the next five years he reverted to a conservative style after van Gogh and Vlaminck. The whereabouts of all the paintings from his initial visionary chapter are unknown; Bess later revealed to his gallerist, Betty Parsons, that he had destroyed the majority. Only one can be envisioned with any certainty, a 1935 canvas sketched in a letter to Dr. Raymond Piper of the Syracuse University philosophy department. The tiny diagram shows a formation of white, wishbone-shaped trees against a field of brown and blue, and is accompanied by the line, “this tr shape has been constant since about 1934.”
When Bess de-sublimated his visionary source around 1946 following a complicated interlude in the camouflage unit of the US Corps of Engineers, the same tree symbol immediately appeared in a second work—the painting shown here. A primal landscape in striated white and yellow ochre, Trees in Snow conjures an unusually enigmatic place, even for Bess. Now the trees entwine in an intricate tangle of engraved lines, wild and tendril-like, a screen of Devonian saplings at once towering and microscopic. They make patterns of nature and survival, the understated horizontals beneath them forming ripples, or a mirage, a frontier or some kind of nether land. Every gesture encodes the invisible. Amid the blank- eting snow, these wheat-coloured contours attest to the matter-of-factness of Bess’s economic hand, his paradoxically delicate roughness, the impossible quietude of his images. He noted later on, “When Meyer Schapiro writes that [my] work is roots of art—shoots of art etc. but sparse—then he feels as I do when two lines compose a finished work for me. But I can’t elaborate—I have no desire to do so.”
at a. SQUIRE, London
until January 11, 2025
