Robert Bechtle was born on May 14, 1932, in San Francisco. In 1954 he received a BFA in graphic design from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now California College of the Arts) in Oakland. After graduation, Bechtle began working as a graphic designer but was drafted into the U.S. Army the same year and stationed in Berlin. On his return to San Francisco in 1956, Bechtle’s interests shifted from commercial arts to painting, which he began to study that year at CCAC. During this time he was introduced to the Bay Area Figurative movement, a group of artists who sought to counter the predominance of New York–based Abstract Expressionism. While Bechtle was abroad, the renowned painter Richard Diebenkorn had joined the faculty at CCAC. He was an important influence on Bechtle, although the latter refused to take a class with the artist to avoid becoming overwhelmed by his influence. Bechtle began teaching at CCAC in the fall of 1957 and received an MFA in painting in 1958.
Bechtle is considered one of the founding Photorealists, a set of artists who used photographs as a point of departure for their hyperrealist art. He first introduced photographs into his painting technique in 1964 as a studio aid, while painting a scene with his wife Nancy Dalton, whom he often depicted in his work. By 1966 his use of photographs had evolved into an integral component of his process. Bechtle typically begins by selecting an image, usually his own photographs or anonymous snapshots, which he then projects onto the canvas from a slide. Bechtle held a particular fascination with the snapshot, typically amateur photographs of cars, for the nature of the subject matter, its immediacy, and lack of affect. He was attracted to the subversive implications of the photo-based technique for complicating the rigid genre hierarchies he had internalized in art school. Bechtle’s interest in the everyday and the ordinary also reveals the influence of Pop art, which he saw firsthand while traveling in Britain in 1961. Bechtle’s early Photorealist works are infused with a subtle realism, and an implicit sense of humor pervades his subjects and compositions. His best-known paintings focus on familiar suburban American middle-class subjects and themes, such as the car and the house. Unlike the gestures and lyricism of Diebenkorn and other artists associated with Bay Area Figuration, Bechtle was interested in attaining a more objective approach to realism.
In 1982, Bechtle married the art historian Whitney Chadwick. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1977, 1982, 1989); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985); American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995); Francis J. Greenburger Foundation (2002); and the Modern Art Council at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA, 2003). Early notable exhibitions that helped establish Bechtle’s career include group shows at San Francisco Art Institute (1966); Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York (1968); and the Milwaukee Art Center (1969). His received his first solo museum exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA, 1967). Bechtle’s work was also shown in several exhibitions and venues critical to the history of Photorealism, such as Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970, 1973); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971); Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1972); Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York (1973); Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul (2001); and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009). In 1991, SFMOMA held a solo exhibition of his work and later mounted a major retrospective in 2005, which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2005), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2006).
