Robert Bechtle
1932–2020
Robert Bechtle began painting realistic imagery in 1963 and by the late 1960s formalized what would become his basic working process—projecting slides and tracing them onto canvas for his Photorealist paintings. Working from snapshots that document everyday life and capture quiet scenes and anonymous situations in his San Francisco Bay Area neighborhood, he was rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and the Bay Area figurative tradition of the preceding generation. Like the Pop artists who incorporated elements of mass culture, Bechtle relied on source materials, but he was not interested in ironic critique. “My interest in these subjects has nothing to do with satire or social comment,” he explained. “I paint them because they are part of what I know and as such I have an affection for them; I am interested in their commonness and in the challenge of making art from such ordinary fare.”
Mediating his work through photography has allowed Bechtle to impartially present the banal, unglamorous facts of ordinary life, even as the specific moment in time caught by the camera is translated and elevated through painting. It is a dialogue through which he has explored the relationship between the two mediums. In ’61 Pontiac Bechtle depicts a familiar scene—a family snapshot of himself with his wife and two children posing in front of their station wagon. The painting’s light is even, and the setting anonymous. Through the title, Bechtle has nominally made the car—a recurring motif in his paintings—the subject rather than his loved ones.
Introduction
Robert Alan Bechtle (May 14, 1932 – September 24, 2020) was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. He lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life. His paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.
Wikidata identifier
Q328645
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 16, 2025.
Introduction
Known for his photorealistic images of quotidian scenes in and around the San Francisco Bay area.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, genre artist, painter, photographer, photorealist
ULAN identifier
500016607
Names
Robert Bechtle, Robert Alan Bechtle
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 16, 2025.
