Robert Bechtle

Robert Bechtle studied at California College of the Arts and Alameda High School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is painting. Employment is recorded with San Francisco State University. Work by Robert Bechtle is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — Robert Bechtle • Born — 14 May 1932 • Birthplace — San Francisco, California, U.S. • Died — 24 September 2020 • Place of death — Berkeley, California, U.S. • Education — California College of Arts and Crafts • Occupation — Artist, educator • Movement — Photorealism, Hyperrealism • Spouse — * Nancy Elizabeth Dalton (m. 1963–1982; div.), • Whitney Chadwick (m. 1982–2020; death) • Children — 2 • Employer — * University of California, Berkeley, • University of California, Davis, • San Francisco State University • Known for — painting, printmaking • Notable Works — Alameda Gran Torino (1974)

Robert Alan Bechtle was born May 14, 1932, in San Francisco, California, to parents Otto Bechtle and Thelma (née Peterson) Bechtle. His mother was a school teacher and his father was an electrician. In early childhood, his family moved to Oakland, and in 1942 he moved to the city of Alameda. Bechtle started drawing at a young age and, with encouragement from his teachers and his family, pursued a future as an artist. He attended Alameda High School. By submitting a portfolio of artwork to a national "Scholastic Magazine" competition, Bechtle won a scholarship that paid for his first year of college. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts (1954) and Master of Fine Arts (1958) from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), in Oakland, California. When he graduated, he was drafted into the United States 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 was an accomplished printmaker. Bechtle began in lithography but, after 1982 when Crown Point Press and Kathan Brown began publishing his prints, worked mainly in etching.

• Illustration — Robert Bechtle, 61 Pontiac, (1968–1969). oil on canvas, 59 3/4 × 84 1/4 in. (151.8 × 214 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © 1969 Robert Bechtle Alongside artists John Baeder, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Richard McLean, Ralph Goings, Bechtle was considered to be one of the earliest Photorealists. By the mid-1960s, he had started developing a style and subject matter that he maintained over his career. Working from his own photographs, Bechtle created paintings described as photographic. Taking inspiration from his local San Francisco Bay Area surroundings, he painted friends and family and the neighborhoods, 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. His painting "'61 Pontiac", (made in 1968–1969) feature an image of himself, his first wife Nancy Elizabeth (née Dalton) and their two young children in front of a car. Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in 2005, when he first noticed a Bechtle painting in 1969, 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". The article concludes: "Life is incredibly complicated, and the proof is that when you confront any simple, stopped part of it you are stupefied."

In 2000, Oakland Museum of California held a retrospective exhibit of Bechtle's paintings, "California Classic: Realist Paintings by Robert Bechtle". In 2005, a major retrospective exhibit and the first full–scale survey of the artist's work, "Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective", was organized and exhibited by SFMOMA, and travelled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Bechtle died of Lewy body dementia while in hospice in Berkeley, California, on September 24, 2020. He was 88 years old, and survived by his wife Whitney Chadwick, and his two children Max and Anne.

Robert Bechtle is recorded with the occupation printmaker. Recorded as a citizen of United States.

Robert Bechtle's work has been exhibited internationally. Museum collections that include his artwork are: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) in Northern California; the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.