TitlePotrero Honda
Artist
Robert Bechtle
(American, 1932 - 2020)
Date1994
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 28 × 38 in.
Framed: 28 3/4 × 38 3/4 × 2 3/8 in.
SignedSigned at lower left: "RB / 94".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, May 25, 1994
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1994.8
Label TextAssociated almost exclusively with his hometown of San Francisco, Robert Bechtle emerged on a national level in the late 1960s as one of the more prominent artists to work in a highly-realistic style that became known as photorealism. Bechtle studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the 1950s, completing his M.F.A. in 1958 and exhibiting his work beginning in the mid-1960s. Photorealism was, in many ways, a response to the hegemonic abstraction that preceded it in the 1950s and 1960s and was practiced by artists such as Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Idelle Weber, and many others. The movement has benefited from renewed interest in recent years and Bechtle was the subject of a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.Many photorealist artists are known for specializing in specific subject matter: Close for portraiture, Estes for urban views, Cottingham for signs, etcetera. Bechtle, however, has primarily created paintings of suburban streets and various images of his family in the Bay Area that are often illuminated in the bright California sun. Like his other photorealist practitioners, Bechtle works entirely and unapologetically from photographs. "Portrero Honda" is one of a group of paintings the artist created in the early 1990s of the Portrero neighborhood in San Francisco. The snapshot quality of the painting is purposeful and the artist has commented that "When I'm photographing a car in front of a house I try to keep in mind what a real estate photographer would do if he were taking a picture of the house and try for that quality."
