Forrest Bess produced The Search at a pivotal early moment in his career, after he was hospitalized and subsequently released from the US Army. Evoking a vaguely menacing scene, the composition has been understood by some as Bess’s response to the trauma of being beaten for his homosexuality by fellow soldiers during World War II.
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The work is the first of three free-standing paintings Bess created on multiple layers of acetate encased in glass and held in a specially constructed frame. It employs a personal symbolism that he further developed in his paintings of the 1950s, seeming to show three flatly rendered figures exiting a cave and making their way into an ambiguous landscape. Describing the role of searching in his process, Bess explained, “I sense that I have very little to do with what is put down . . . The vision is there . . . after it is painted I am as muchly an outsider, looking at, as you are.”
