By RACHEL WOLFF

Christies

'Untitled,' 1957

Texan Forrest Bess liked to fish, study the psychology of Carl Jung and make abstract art. He died little-known and impoverished in 1977, but this month Christie's is exhibiting 39 of his paintings and offering 35 of those for between $100,000 and $300,000 each.

The auction firm's New York branch is staging the exhibition to benefit the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Two friends and patrons of the artist's had owned the works. Only 125 or so Bess paintings are known to exist.

Jim Wilford/Christies

Forrest Bess, photographed about 40 years ago (he died in 1977)

Bess's work bears the hallmarks of an "outsider artist," someone who is untrained and functions largely outside of the art-world establishment, but the eccentric recluse nevertheless dabbled quite a bit on the "inside."

Born in 1911 in Bay City, Bess studied architecture briefly at Texas AM University (a compromise with his parents—he had wanted to study art), traveled to Mexico to look at work by Diego Rivera, designed Army camouflage during World War II and later worked as a fisherman on the Gulf Coast. He made paintings throughout, many based on his own visions.

"The paintings came to him in a flash, in a half-sleeping state," says sculptor and Bess enthusiast Robert Gober. "And from that, he would make an image. He never changed it or made it prettier. For him, it was just about getting it down on the page. He was puzzled himself about what these visions were and what they mean."

In 1948, Bess traveled to New York and met famed dealer Betty Parsons, who agreed to show his work. (Her other artists included Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.) Several exhibitions followed, but Bess continued to live a life of poverty and solitude in a shanty-like house he put together on an island near the Texas Gulf Coast.

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Christies

'Red Rain,' 1967

The artist also became interested in mysticism and fringe sexology. He wrote Jung about his theory of hermaphroditism as a means of achieving immortality (Jung answered that Bess's ideas are not unique but are rediscovered "once each century," according to a 1982 article). Bess even conducted several procedures on himself to make the case. He died from skin cancer at age 66.

Bess also has a place in this year's Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Mr. Gober has curated a display of archival papers and work (including 10 standout paintings borrowed from museums and private collections). Bess had long wanted to exhibit his treatise on gender alongside his work but Parsons declined to do so. "My project was to make happen what never happened in his lifetime," Mr. Gober says.

“Christie's is offering an outsider's vision-inspired paintings at $100,000 to $300,000 each.”

The Christie's paintings date from 1938 to 1968, starting with portraits and nudes in a Fauvist fashion and moving into abstractions—an orange mass on a rocky black horizon and canvases divided into stark color fields, sprinkled with lines, dots and stars.

Amy Cappellazzo, Christie's chairman of postwar and contemporary art, has high expectations for the private sale, as Bess's work rarely comes to market and his "Untitled No. 6," a pink canvas bedecked with a red circle and an upside-down crag, fetched a record $112,900 at Sotheby's in November. The same work sold for $21,850 in 2000.

The Christie's show will be on view until April 3; the Whitney Biennial will close May 27. Houston's Menil Collection plans a 2013 retrospective.