- Robert Bechtle
Infobox Artist
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name = Robert Bechtle
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birthdate = 1932
location =San Francisco ,California
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nationality = American
field =Painting
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awards =Robert Bechtle, an American painter, born in
San Francisco, California onMay 14 ,1932 . He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from theCalifornia College of Arts and Crafts inOakland, 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 toBerlin , 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 whenCrown Point Press began publishing his prints.He taught at
San Francisco State University from 1978 to 1999. Bechtle lives and works in thePotrero Hill neighborhood ofSan Francisco, California .Work
Considered one of the earliest Photorealists along with
Richard Estes ,Chuck Close andRalph 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 inThe 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.”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, theSmithsonian Institution and theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art .External links
Robert Bechtle is represented by [http://www.gladstonegallery.com/bechtle.asp Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, NY]
and [http://www.gallerypauleanglim.com/bechtle_robert.html Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, CA]
"Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective" exhibited at the [http://www.sfmoma.org/ San Francisco Museum of Modern Art] (February 12 - June 5, 2005) the [http://www.themodern.org/ Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth] (June 26 - August 28, 2005) and at the [http://www.corcoran.org/ Corcoran Gallery of Art]
In May to October 2000, the
Oakland Museum led a retrospective of Bechtle's paintings, "California Classic: Realist Paintings by Robert Bechtle".Robert Bechtle has made prints with [http://www.magical-secrets.com/artists/bechtle/video Crown Point Press in San Francisco, CA] since 1982. Video interview with the artist.
Robert Bechtle - [http://www.meiselgallery.com/LKMG/artistsFrameset.html Louis K. Meisel Gallery, NY]
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* [http://www.museumca.org/exhibit/exhib_bechtle.html "Southwest Art"] , 5/2000, 'A California Realist' by Marina Freeman
* [http://www.sfmoma.org/press/pressroom.asp?id=280&do=recent 6/1/2006 SFMOMA Press Release]
* Photorealism by Louis K. Meisel. Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, (1980).
* [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/09/050509craw_artworld "The New Yorker"] , 5/2005, 'Parked Cars' by Peter Schjeldahl
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