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.

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.”