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 have Bess paintings in their collections. References http://www.forrestbess.org/about.html, "About Forrest Bess" External links Forrest Bess site - contains a biography, paintings, articles and more information about the artist. 1911 births 1977 deaths 20th-century American painters American male painters Abstract painters Outsider artists People from Bay City, Texas 20th-century American male artists Deaths from skin cancer Deaths from cancer in Texas