Mystery Outlives Painter

Sarah Higgins braced her slight frame against the weight of a thick steel door. The vault opened, relinquishing its seal with a satisfying belch, and Higgins stepped inside, into a museum curator’s vision of purgatory.

There are days when Higgins, the director and only full-time staff member of a county museum in South Texas, feels blessed to be in here, when she feels she is surrounded by genius. Then there are days like this, when she fears she is standing amid a pile of junk. Either way, a mystery that has plagued this town for more than a decade is about to end in a maddening manner: unsolved.

In May, the Matagorda County Museum plans to clear out its vault, auctioning off 89 paintings that were done, by all appearances, by the late abstract artist Forrest Bess, a Bay City native. Analysts say the sale could be significant for contemporary art and could raise enough to turn the little museum’s world, and its $150,000 annual budget, upside-down.

If only someone could prove they are real.

“We just don’t know,” Higgins said. “Nobody does. At this point, the board of directors’ position is this: Get rid of them. We need to wash our hands of this whole thing. They aren’t doing anybody any good here. They’ll look nice on somebody’s wall, whether they’re real or not.”

The days leading to the auction will be bittersweet for Bay City, an amiable and unfussy town of 19,000 people sprinkled with Pentecostal churches, drinking halls made of corrugated metal and a manicurist whose sign reads “Diane’s Nails and Toes.”

As often as they have frustrated this town since they were sold to the museum for $1, the paintings -- and their mysterious origin -- have helped sustain it too. For a decade now, Bay City has reveled in its outsized intrigue, and hoity-toity debate about the integrity of the art can still be heard in the clubhouse of the local golf course and in the thrift stores and boot shops that frame the courthouse square.

“I don’t really even like them, to be honest with you,” said Barbara Smith, the museum’s assistant director.

“But I got real attached to them. I guess we all did. I like to solve puzzles, to make things right in the world. But it just isn’t going to happen. Not this time.”

It is fair to say that Forrest Bess -- a cultured and often pretentious intellectual, a schizophrenic, an artistic visionary, an aspiring hermaphrodite -- did not fit in here.

He was born in 1911, the son of a hard-driving, hard-living oil field wildcatter. When he was 4, he had his first vision. As he described it later in letters, he was seated at a table staring at a ray of sunlight, which was passing through one of his mother’s vases. Eventually, the light took the form of cobblestone streets. Then a tiger and a lion joined him in the room.

In what would become a common thread in his life, a simultaneous drive for eccentricity and acceptance consumed his youth. He was a jock in high school and the salutatorian of his class. He was also an artist -- pencil and paper, then oil on cardboard -- and a dreamer who befuddled his peers with erudite dissertations on psychology and the legends of Troy.

“He was always trying to learn something new,” said Bess’ younger brother and only known surviving relative, 88-year-old Milton Bess of Corpus Christi, Texas. “And he was always artistic. I couldn’t even draw a straight line.”

Forrest Bess drifted as a young man. He studied architecture at two Texas universities, designed camouflage for the military during World War II and traveled to Mexico, where he encountered artists such as the populist Diego Rivera. After the war, he returned to the Bay City area, living in a tent at his family’s bait camp on a weed-choked peninsula.

By the mid-1940s, his “visions” were coming regularly -- circles and crosses and geometric shapes that looked like palm fronds, brooding colors that Higgins can only describe, with an ever-present matronly smile, as “like vomit.” Bess translated his visions onto canvas, often summoning them by pressing his thumbs into his eyelids.

Increasingly, he began to suspect that his visions had something to teach the world. Slowly, people in the evolving community of modern art began to agree.

After several shows in Texas, Bess exhibited his work in New York. The paintings were well received and his name was mentioned alongside abstract pioneers like Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still. The late Meyer Schapiro, an art historian, critic and Columbia University scholar who helped usher abstract art into the mainstream, declared Bess’ work “rare at any time.”

“He was a primitive, naive, untrained artist who was extremely talented and important,” said Geri Hooks, who has owned for 35 years a Houston art gallery that specializes in contemporary and modern art.

Students, artists and authors began making pilgrimages to the shack Bess eventually built for himself near the community of Chinquapin, south of Bay City, though it was accessible only by boat. Bess regaled his visitors late into the night with tales of the unknown, fueled by booze and mysterious seafood stews.

All along, he was descending into what was later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. He began to obsess over psychology, particularly the theories of Carl Jung, which sought to heal people by seeking harmony between the conscious and the “collective unconscious.”

Much to the consternation of Jung -- one of the many luminaries who corresponded with the artist -- Bess proposed that people could achieve perfection by altering their genitals. In 1960, he performed surgery on himself, possibly with the assistance of a local doctor, in an effort to become neither male nor female. Though his art continued to hang in New York galleries, even the eccentrics in the art world began to distance themselves.

There were moments of lucidity: a last art show at a local hotel; the time he volunteered at a local school by painting instructional materials. But for the most part, he was unkempt and talked to himself in public. His shock of white hair grew increasingly unruly and turned him into an unmistakable figure around town, where he often wandered the streets.

He died in 1977, at age 66, in a one-story nursing home with green trim and a mural of rocking chairs painted on the walls of the porch. Even today, the few elderly residents who remember Bess speak of him in a whisper, or don’t speak of him at all.

“He was the town loon, and everyone was pretty well frightened of him,” said Hooks, a Bay City native. “But everybody knew that he made pretty pictures.”

Bess was thought to have painted only 100 or so pieces, a few of which hung on the walls of acquaintances’ homes in South Texas at the time of his death. Then, in 1993, a San Antonio art collector stunned Bay City with an offer: He wanted to “bring Forrest Bess home” by selling a collection of 89 previously unknown Bess paintings.

The price was $40,000. The value of Bess paintings has been erratic and it was difficult to say how much the collection was worth. (A New York gallery recently offered to pay $100,000 for a single Bess painting, unconnected to the Bay City affair.)

The Matagorda County Museum, on any other day, is like dozens of others in rural Texas, dedicated not to art, but to pioneer days and local shipwrecks and housed in a stately, abandoned post office. The deal would have sapped most of the institution’s rainy-day fund. But there was little dispute that it was a steal.

“The prospect of having this collection in Bay City is very exciting,” one dealer wrote when the museum asked her opinion. “Good Luck!!!” The letter is among hundreds of pages of documents the museum has collected over the years connected to the saga.

A museum newsletter in 1993 carried the headline: “A Great Treasure Now Available.”

“He left many friends who may not have understood him, but were in awe of him,” the newsletter said. “To have 89 of his originals is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

In 1995, before the deal was complete, the collector offering the paintings, Leonard Joseph Quinlin, died. Around the same time, an art appraiser hired by the museum concluded that the paintings were forgeries. The museum’s board members soon learned that Quinlin had a curious habit of acquiring art and other objects that looked valuable, but were not.

The San Antonio AIDS Foundation, which had no dealings with Quinlin when he was alive, was named the recipient of most of the estate, including artwork and jewelry.

“We thought we had struck gold when we first heard about it,” said David Ewell, the foundation’s executive director. “We thought: ‘Wow. Who is this man? Why did he do this for us?’ ”

Almost all of it, Ewell said, was of no significant value.

“There were some bizarre little trinkets, little things with devils on them, a strange collection,” Ewell said. “We tried to put it on consignment at antique stores, but just like the art, it was worthless, mostly replicas.”

Concerned that Quinlin’s estate could be exposed to liability after it was determined the paintings were possibly forgeries, the lawyer representing the state effectively gave the paintings to the museum “to be disposed at the Museum’s discretion,” according to one document in the museum archives.

The museum paid $1, Higgins said.

Some pieces in Quinlin’s collections, such as a group of porcelain figurines that were among the items given to the AIDS foundation, proved to be quite valuable after his death, said Linda K. Armstrong, the San Antonio lawyer who represented his estate. But much of it was either faked or replicated, and Armstrong, who is now retired, is one of the few people who is absolutely convinced that Quinlin’s collection of Bess paintings is a fraud.

She believes Quinlin, a retired schoolteacher and administrator, bought them from a well-known San Antonio-area forger, who has since disappeared.

“Mr. Quinlin had an excellent reputation,” she said. “He was a fine man. I simply can’t imagine, in my wildest dreams, that he would ever be involved in something like this, in knowingly handling fraudulent artwork. I’ve always felt that he was duped too, just like everybody else.... It’s a mess. The museum should just burn them all up.”

At least four appraisals of the Bess paintings have been done since Quinlin’s death. All of them contradict each other.

One, for instance, used ultraviolet light to determine whether Bess’ signatures, all in the lower right corner of the paintings, were scrawled at the same time the paintings were completed. That is a standard indicator of a painting’s authenticity because most artists sign their work immediately. The art historian who conducted the test concluded that 11 of the paintings were “possibly authentic.” Other historians, however, felt that Bess’ mental state was so deteriorated that it was unfair to apply that test to him.

Every effort by the museum to resolve the confusion only created more questions. For example, the museum tried at one point to rule on the paintings’ authenticity by assessing their style and technique. That proved impossible because Bess had a Picasso-like spectrum of distinct phases, painting everything from abstracts to intricate seascapes and architectural renderings.

Once the exact science of testing the paintings’ authenticity failed, the works were thrown to the cutthroat world of art dealers and buyers -- where the innocent-until-proven-guilty notion is often trumped by gossip. They were not received well. Quinlin’s affinity for objects of questionable pedigree, as well as his acquaintance with the forger, further tainted the paintings.

“I would like nothing more than for them to be real, and there is a chance that they are,” Hooks said. “But it’s not possible, not when we know who handled them. No, I take that back. It’s possible. It’s not probable. Even if they are real, they are so tainted that no one is going to buy them for any significant amount of money.”

At Higgins’ urging, the museum board of directors voted unanimously late last year to hold a “buyer-beware” auction. It is scheduled for May.

“My own personal opinion is that there are four or five that are real,” Higgins said. “But I can’t substantiate it, and at this point I assume no one else can either. We can’t say that they are fake. But we can’t sell them as real. Whichever it is, everyone thinks that it is time.”

The museum has one painting, donated separately by a local resident, that is a confirmed Forrest Bess original. It is the only painting in the collection that the museum isn’t selling.