Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective

by Janet C. Bishop, Jonathan Weinberg, Michael Auping

Tracing Robert Bechtle's career from his earliest paintings of the 1960s to the present day, this is the definitive book on one of the founders and foremost practitioners of American Photorealism. Created in close collaboration with the artist, Robert Bechtle will accompany the distinguished painter's first retrospective exhibition. Lavish plates feature reproductions of approximately ninety of Bechtle's most significant artworks, from large-scale oil paintings to intimate watercolors and drawings. These magnificent illustrations portray the range of the San Francisco-based painter's iconic imagery of California—the rows of palm trees, stucco houses, and the ubiquitous automobiles that spurred suburban expansion—as well as his lesser-known but equally compelling family scenes and stark interiors. Bechtle's preference for wide, empty spaces; his flat, sun-bleached palette; and his detached mode of recording random details impart a singular sense of alienation to his subjects. His deadpan paintings capture the essence of the postwar American experience, in which California often serves as the testing ground for the realization of national dreams.

Genres: Art

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 2005

Reviews

[Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The internet seems infinite, but in the case of Robert Bechtle it is not. I was looking to learn more about the artist, and I soon ran out of material online — partly because he came to fame many decades ago. This catalog was published when the SFMOMA did a retrospective on Bechtle in 2005, and it contains a handful of essays and some other analysis. I appreciated the opening essay and the completeness if the chronology at the end, but some of the essays felt like they were reaching.

[Donnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

My thoughts:

Bechtle's ability to record detail is fascinating--check out those leaves in Roses.

To have viewed many of his paintings when they were painted (e.g. in the 1970's) would have been to view stark images of the settings of shallow lives. To view them now is to be grateful he so accurately captured the essence of that time (which is, happily, gone.)

To do a painting where the focal subject is the oil stains in a parking space (e.g. Oakland Ghia) or worn spaces in the paint of a cross walk and cracks in the street (e.g. Texas Street Intersection)--mind bending. Yet evidence that nothing--no matter its seeming insignificance, is unimportant.

[Deke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know if it's possible for people who didn't grow up in California over the past 48 years to love Bechtle's work as much as I do, as his meticulous, luminescent photorealism is amplified powerfully by nostalgia.