Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity at an isolated bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, alongside superstar artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his death in 1977, Bess's small visionary paintings are now prized by museums and collectors for their primal beauty, and can fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's treasured canvases were only part of a grander theory—based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals—that proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. As an artist, Bess could never equivocate, and in 1960 he underwent an operation to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. For the first time ever in print, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle combines the beauty of Bess's art with the drama and tragedy of his personal life. Using Bess's own hauntingly sincere words (in letters to Betty Parsons, Meyer Schapiro, and others) the book traces the life and logic of this forgotten artist and explains how a love of beauty and a desire for wholeness lead Bess to self-surgery and, ultimately, a mental hospital. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is a fascinating look at one of America's most notorious cult visionaries—a man who truly believed that art could save his life.

Published on the occasion of the first Forrest Bess solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (3 October - 1 December 2018).This catalogue includes a broad selection of paintings dating from 1948-1970 and representing all four of the decades that define the 'visionary' period for which Bess has come to be known.Accompanying the works is a new essay by Professor Mark Turner, King's College London, on Bess's life, his theories and art.Frequently relegated to the peripheries of art history, both as a Texas native and a rarely understood queer man, Bess might nevertheless be re-located at the heart of American Modernism.Between 1949 and 1967 he showed at least five times at Betty Parsons' New York gallery, on the same walls that debuted Barnett Newman, Richard Tuttle, Ellsworth Kelly, and other focal figures of twentieth-century abstraction.Simultaneously he engaged in correspondence with sociologists, psychotherapists, art historians, and even NASA, to communicate a series of radical medico-mystical theories he had devised that were, he believed, of critical importance to Mankind.

Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state's dramatic history and geography. This barely known chapter in the story of American art is the focus of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas. Presenting new research and artwork that has never before been published, Katie Robinson Edwards examines the contributions of many modernist painters and sculptors in Texas, with an emphasis on the era's most abstract and compelling artists. Edwards looks first at the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial, which offered local artists a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. She then traces the modernist impulse through various manifestations, including the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston; early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity; the Fort Worth Circle; artists at the University of Texas at Austin; Houston artists in the 1950s; sculpture in and around an influential Fort Worth studio; and, to see how some Texas artists fared on a national scale, the Museum of Modern Art's "Americans" exhibitions. The first full-length treatment of abstract art in Texas during this vital and canon-defining period, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas gives these artists their due place in American art, while also valuing the quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production.

Omni was a jewel among popular science magazines of its era (1978–1998). Science Digest, Science News, Scientific America, and Discover may have all been selling well to armchair scientists, but Omni masterfully blended cutting edge science news and science fiction, flashy graphic design, a touch of sex, and the images of a generation of artists completely free and unburdened by the disciplines of the masters. Created by the legendary Bob Guccione, better known for founding Penthouse than perhaps any of the other facets of his inspired career in business, art, and literature, Guccione handpicked the artists and illustrators that contributed to the Omni legacy—they in turn created works ignited by passion and intellect, two of Guccione's principal ideals. The Mind's Eye: The Art of Omni is the very first publication to celebrate in stunning detail the exceptional science fiction imagery of this era in an oversized format. The Mind's Eye contains 185 images from contributing Omni artists including John Berkey, Chris Moore, H.R. Giger, Rafal Olbinski, Rallé, Tsuneo Sanda, Hajime Sorayama, Robert McCall, and Colin Hay among many more, along with quotes from artists, contributors, writers, and critics. Omni lived in a time well before the digital revolution. The images you see on these pages have taken years to track down and brought the editors in touch with many esteemed artists, amazing photographers and dusty storage lockers. Their quest is far from over; you'll notice an almost decade-long gap in the material, the contents of which were either lost or destroyed. Efforts to search throughout the universe for any images will continue and will be shared with the world at the all-things-Omni website, omnireboot.com. Stay tuned... Collected in book form for the first time ever, the striking art from this extraordinary magazine will delight fans who remember seeing the work years ago and newcomers interested in the unique aesthetic of this genre's biggest artists. "Omni was a magazine about the future. From 1978 to 1998 Omni blew minds by regularly featuring extensive Q&As with some of the top scientists of the 20th century—E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk—tales of the paranormal, and some of the most important science fiction to ever see magazine publication: William Gibson's genre-defining stories 'Burning Chrome' and 'Johnny Mnemonic,' Orson Scott Card's 'Unaccompanied Sonata,' novellas by Harlan Ellison and George R. R. Martin, 'Thanksgiving,' a postapocalyptic tale by Joyce Carol Oates—even William S. Burroughs graced its pages." —Vice magazine, Motherboard "Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future...Omni was sui generis. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years...Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at." —Ben Bova, six-time Hugo award winner

"A new book of essays by the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin"--

In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Childrenof William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who are, like the nineteenth century poet, dissenters from consensus--Wallace Berman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jay DeFeo, Hilma af Klint, Katherine Bradford, Barbara Takenaga, Forrest Bess, Emmet Gowin, Sophia Al-Maria, and Simon Gouverneur, to name but a few. Yau locates and defines a shared sensibility among his subjects whose work is often set at an oblique angle to the larger culture. He probes the reasons for this stance and its aesthetic consequences and, most provocatively, inspects the how and why behind the impulse to deflect their importance. For instance, he asserts that Jay DeFeo's masterwork, The Rose, "calls many assumptions into question and challenges canonical thinking about what constitutes a major achievement in postwar art." This questioning marks each essay in the collection, a volume that sets out to reorder, if not outright dismantle, the exclusionary hierarchies that have dominated cultural discourse for decades. Blake's "wild children" are alive and well, and in Yau's nimble, intelligent prose their dissonance is exactingly parsed and joyously celebrated.

Some 250 works explore three distinct periods in American history when mainstream and outlier artists intersected, ushering in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. The exhibition aligns work by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican with both historic folk art and works by self-taught artists ranging from Horace Pippin to Janet Sobel and Joseph Yoakum. It also examines a recent influx of radically expressive work made on the margins that redefined the boundaries of the mainstream art world, while challenging the very categories of "outsider" and "self-taught." Historicizing the shifting identity and role of this distinctly American version of modernism's "other," the exhibition probes assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture. The exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art.--Provided by publisher.

A breathtaking exploration of one of Twombly's largest paintings, the second version of his Treatise on the Veil One of the most important American postwar artists, Cy Twombly (1928-2011) engaged with mythological and poetic source material, setting him apart from other artists of his generation. In 1970, Twombly revisited his 1968 painting Treatise on the Veil and, in a short period of focused creativity, produced a painting--Treatise on the Veil (Second Version)--on a single, 33-foot canvas along with more than a dozen related drawings. This handsomely produced oversize book features three essays that examine these works in relation to Twombly's oeuvre, contemporaneous explorations of time, the Orpheus myth, and a musical composition that Twombly cited as an influence. Large images and details bring us in close to Twombly's magnificent meditation on time and space. Distributed for The Menil Collection

"Fragments from the Delta of Venus is an amazing collaboration between feminist artist Judy Chicago and Iconic writer Anais Nin, where Chicago's paintings illustrate Nin's most sensual passages from her classic collection of erotic stories.

A comprehensive overview of the artist's work focuses on Burchfield's expressive watercolors and includes drawing from his 1917 sketchbook, camouflage designs from his tour in the army, and wallpaper designs from the 1920s.