Robert Bechtle “What you see in making the painting is a lot more than you see when taking the photo. For instance, maybe there is a tree casting a shadow over stairs. In the photo, it registers as just an area of shadow. But when you start to paint it, there is a lot going on there, and you have to find a way to deal with it that will feel right to people.” -Robert Bechtle
Potrero Stroller - Crossing Arkansas Street, 1988: Oil on canvas 40 x 48” When Robert Bechtle began making his hand-painted imitations of photographs in the mid-1960s, many people thought they didn’t look like art. Pop art was capturing the art world’s attention, and Andy Warhol was directly and imperfectly transferring photos to canvases and adding handmade flourishes and non-specific colors; his paintings were radical, but had an art feel. By contrast, Bechtle’s precisely drawn work was cool and photographic. It was radical art, but the artist’s painterly craftsmanship made its newness hard to recognize.
Santa Barbara Patio, 1983: Oil on Canvas 48 x 60” Bechtle was a pioneer of what is now known as photorealist painting, a deadpan, straight-ahead camera-informed realism. Although many of the early photorealists (Richard Estes, for example) lived in New York, Bechtle developed his style in San Francisco, influenced by Richard Diebenkorn’s figurative work, by minimal art, and by a desire to get away from expressionism. His paintings are characterized by the misty quality of the light in San Francisco, and by middle class neighborhoods, automobiles, and ordinary people. Bechtle was born in San Francisco in 1932 and continues to live there. He is represented by the Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco and by the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is opening a major retrospective of his paintings in February 2005. It will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth later in the year.
Oakland Intersection - 59th and Stanford, 1980: Oil on canvas, 40 x 58” In the 1990’s, philosophers often pointed out that everything we see-a landscape, a person, an object-is mediated (separated from our direct experience) by our knowledge of how a camera lens sees things. Part of the magic of Bechtle’s vision is the sense of impending movement in a quiet picture. His scenes don’t seem to be timeless. In them, we recognize a camera-eye view, and consequently feel that the light will be different in a few moments, the shadows stronger and longer. A car will move. A person will appear. Nowadays some artist-photographers make models, build sets, or employ actors so they can set up their photographs to be unnerving by seeming to be timeless. They go to these elaborate lengths to subvert the feeling that photographs ordinarily reflect a world in flux. “The sense of time in a painting is very slow, very static, long term, Bechtle has said in a recent interview.” The sense of time in a photograph tends to be immediate.” Bechtle’s work melds both those senses of time.
Potrero Crest - 19th and Pennsylvania: Oil on linen, 40x 48” His use of strong light and shadow creates an isolated mood, yet the picture seems to be going on beyond its boundaries. Bechtle’s world is at the edges of his paintings. Especially in his mature, most recent work, the center is often in shadow or without much incident. We can rest in isolation there, then drift to bright, active edges and move past the painting to the real world. In Bechtle’s vision-the special knowledge about the world that, beyond style, makes a Bechtle painting or print recognizably a Bechtle-the center, our normal point of focus, is less interesting than the edges. He emphasizes the part of life just beyond what we see when we first look.
Bechtle has worked in printmaking off and on through his entire career, beginning with lithography and continuing, through his association with Crown Point Press, with etching, woodcut, and monotype. His prints and paintings have influenced one another. “Printmaking,” he says, “is a way of thinking about what you are doing in a different way.”
-Kathan Brown