Christie’s is selling off forty paintings by Forrest Bess, legendary Texas fish-camp hermit and symbolist painter to benefit the UT’s MD Anderson Cancer Center in a private sale running from March 1-April 3, 2012. Bess has been an underground favorite for years, but his rare, cryptic small scale works are suddenly getting some limelight as nearly a third of his known output goes on display and on sale on the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, at Rockefeller Center.
Best of all for us longtime Bess fans (who wish we had been able to afford the $30,000 one of his works would have cost ten years ago; as Christie’s is offering the 8×10 inch paintings for between $100,000 and $300,000 each) is the catalog for the show, available online, which collects the facts of Bess’ eccentric career, with a timeline, critical essays and period photos.
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And then there’s the Bess works inserted by Robert Gober into the Whitney Biennial…