Robert Bechtle

'56 Chrysler, 1956, Oakland Museum of California

Robert Bechtle is something of a sleight-of-hand artist. As a noted photorealist, he paints, in an extraordinarily precise style, scenes of contemporary, middle-class California life: families, neighborhoods, and cars—the Gran Torinos, Pontiacs, Buicks and T-Birds of suburbia. He works from the kind of undistinguished snapshots that, as he said, make terrible photos but good paintings when painted at large scale. Only close up is it evident that his paintings aren’t photographs. No brush strokes. No drips. No hand.

Like other painters coming of age in the late 1950s, Bechtle struggled to find a way out of the era’s dominant abstraction. At the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bechtle was awed by Richard Diebenkorn but fearful of his influence. Bechtle found his muse in Pop, with its interest in the ordinary. Bechtle’s aim was to achieve a kind of neutrality, so subject is noticed first, and style second—if at all. “It was sort of a way of saying, ‘I’m not interested in style. This is a no-style way of painting,’” he said in a 2004 profile. 

But such a statement obscures the incredible artistry of Bechtle’s works. His tightly controlled paint handling and use of photographic source material questioned some basic issues of genre, style, and intention. Bechtle’s large canvases, which took months to complete, began with a Renaissance-style undercoat of burnt sienna. Light hitting a surface—especially the fog-filtered light of San Francisco--was his true subject. Even the cars were more style than subject. As his son said, “He thought they looked cool from a painter’s standpoint.”

Bechtle also managed a new vision of the California landscape. In the spectacularly beautiful Bay Area, he didn’t paint the ocean, the bridges, the sunsets. His focus was on parked cars, bungalow houses with boring gardens, people just standing there. But look what he does with ‘56 Chrysler. The rigid yet asymmetrical geometry of the houses—does the passage between them suggest Vermeer’s Little Street?—are balanced by the sexy flow of the pink Chrysler. And XING keeps us at bay. It’s complex, artful, and full of mystery. What secrets lie behind those blinds?

Bechtle was a native Californian, born in San Francisco and raised in Alameda. He lived most of his life in the Bay Area, and taught at CCAC, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and San Francisco State. Later in life, he became interested in lithography and etching and continued his exploration of urban landscapes in those media. He died in Berkeley in 2020.