Robert Bechtle

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Robert Bechtle, an American painter, born in San Francisco, California on May 14, 1932. He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, in 1954 and 1958 respectively.

Bechtle has lived all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his art is centered on scenes from everyday life.

He started drawing at a young age and with encouragement from his teachers and family, pursued a future as an artist. Bechtle won a scholarship that paid for his first year of college by submitting a portfolio of artwork to a national competition. After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), he was drafted into the U.S Army and sent to Berlin, where he painted murals in the mess hall and delighted in visiting European museums. Besides making paintings, watercolors, and drawings, he is an accomplished printmaker: he worked in lithography early in his career and mainly in etching after 1982 when Crown Point Press began publishing his prints.

He taught at San Francisco State University from 1978 to 1999. Bechtle lives and works in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California.

1 Work
2 Career
3 External links
4 Sources

[edit] Work

Considered one of the earliest Photorealists along with Richard Estes, Chuck Close and Ralph Goings. By the mid-sixties, he had started developing a style and subject matter that he maintained over his career. Working from his own photographs, Bechtle created paintings that are described as photographic. Taking inspiration from his local San Francisco surroundings, he painted the neighborhoods, friends, family, and street scenes–paying special attention to automobiles. Bechtle's brushwork is barely detectable in his photo-like renditions. His paintings reveal his perspective on how things look to him, the color and the light of a commonplace scene. Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker that in 1969, when he first noticed a Bechtle painting, he was “rattled by the middle-class ordinariness of the scene.” As he looked more closely, he discovered “a feat of resourceful painterly artifice” that he gradually realized was “beautiful.” Schjeldahl concludes the article in this way: “Life is incredibly complicated, and the proof is that when you confront any simple, stopped part of it you are stupefied.”

[edit] Career

Robert Bechtle's work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York, as well as the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.