"Robert Bechtle, the California photorealist painter whose meticulous works gave wonder to the everyday, has died, aged 88. A lifelong Bay Area resident, Bechtle captured the unique light and wonder of the community.
"Bechtle was born in San Francisco in 1932, and raised in Sacramento and Alameda. His father Otto Bechtle was a telephone lineman who died when Robert was only 12, and he and his younger brother were raised by their mother, a schoolteacher. Showing an early aptitude, he received a scholarship from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland. Shortly after graduating with a bachelor’s degree, he was drafted into the military and stationed in Berlin. While there, Bechtle painted a mural in his company’s mess hall and visited every European museum he could. Upon his return to the US, he took advantage of the GI Bill to enroll again at the Oakland college for his MFA.
"Bechtle started working as an artist during the era of the Bay Area figuratists, with artists like Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff leading the way. The figuratists were known for their heavy, stylised use of paint, and Bechtel worked in this fashion for a brief time, but moved away from it as he discovered his preference for high realism. “As Bechtle tells it, he tried to be a Bay Area figurative artist but he just wasn't a very good one,” says Janet Bishop, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) in a video interview. Bechtle adds that his pursuit of realism was "“a way of saying I’m not interested in style. This is a no-style way of painting, it just goes back to looking. This is a classic painter’s ploy—to say I just want to look, observe, and learn—and it worked.”"
--Wallace Ludel in The Art Newspaper, 9.25.20
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