Robert Bechtle

Robert Bechtle ( born May 14, 1932 in San Francisco, California, USA); lives in San Francisco and is an American contemporary painter, printmaker and an important representative of photorealism.

Life and work

Robert Alan Bechtle studied from 1950 to 1958 at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California and from 1960 to 1961 at the University of California at Berkeley, California.

Bechtle spent his whole life in the San Francisco Bay Area and the focus of his art is to reproduce the scenes of everyday life there. He began as a teenager with drawings with the support of his teachers and his family and consistently pursued his career as an artist. Bechtle won a scholarship that funded his first year of college.

After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), he joined the U.S. Army to Berlin, where he painted murals for the canteen and the European museums visited. In addition to his paintings, watercolors and drawings, he is also a renowned graphic artist: he worked as a lithographer at the beginning of his career, and especially after 1982 with etchings, published by the Crown Point Press. Robert Bechtle has taught at San Francisco State University in 1978 to 1999. Bechtle lives and works in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Robert Bechtle was one of the earliest photo realists with Richard Estes, Chuck Close and Ralph Goings. The mid-1960s, he began to find his own style and his subject matter that he used for a lifetime. His inspiration, he relates from his local neighborhood in San Francisco, he paints the surroundings, his friends and family and the street scenes. He devotes special attention to cars. Bechtles brushwork is barely detectable in the pictures, they look like photos.

In 1972 he participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the Department of realism. His works belong to the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institution and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
• Documenta Archive (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X