Robert Bechtle

American, 1932–2020

Robert Bechtle was an American Photorealist painter known for his depictions of sunlit streets and everyday life. With a distinctive, non-narrative aesthetic, his watercolors and oil paintings documented friends, family, automobiles, and architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area. “They’re all things that I’ve noticed just living here,” the artist once said of his subject matter. “Things that I see on my walk in the morning, or I’m driving by and something jumps out and says, ‘photograph me'.” Born on May 14, 1932 in San Francisco, CA, Bechtle studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, graduating with an MFA in 1958. Though his early work was gestural and influenced by the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, Bechtle made a decisive step to produce paintings based on photographs during the mid-1960s. This new approach to painting from photographs, linked him with artists such as Richard Estes and Richard McLean. He continues to live and work in San Francisco, CA. Today, the artist's work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Bechtle passed away on September 24, 2020 at the age of 88 in Berkeley, California.

Courtesy Artnet