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Lot Essay
The recent retrospective of Robert Bechtle's work, curated by Janet Bishop, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, has brought about a much-needed reappraisal of the artist's work. Since the mid-1960s, Bechtle's Photo-Realist paintings of southern California have arrested viewers with their uncanny, near-photographic perfection. Often selecting the most seemingly mundane subject matter as inspiration, Bechtle makes 35 mm slides that he then projects onto the surface of his canvas itself. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Bechtle accounts for the dislocation that exists when turning a two-dimensional object (the photograph) into another (the painting) by creating halations - barely palpable halos - between adjoining forms. Doing so infuses his paintings with a realistic sense of atmospheric light and takes away the cold mechanical look of a photograph. Bechtle's work, then, straddles the line between photograph and reality, and the viewer is left to fill in the gaps.
Bechtle's most well-known subjects are those most iconic aspects of suburban southern California -- cars, sun chairs, well-manicured lawns and the people who inhabit them. In Watsonville Chairs, a tour-de-force painting of 1976, Bechtle pays as much exacting detail to the chairs and architecture of the enclosed sun deck as he does to the sole occupant of the scene. As in many of his paintings, his chairs take on a near-human quality, each with a different persona and liveliness. It is interesting to note, too, that Bechtle seems to gravitate toward the artificial, man-made leisure-time activities that became such a staple of suburban America in the 1960s and 70s. In his paintings, he pays as much attention to the tools and implements of our leisure - from cars to chairs - as he does the human occupants of the scene.
Formally speaking, Bechtle's work shares many affinities with the great American modern masters, most notably the painter Edward Hopper. Hopper's compositions often focus attention on formal qualities of architecture and the perceived bleakness of the American roadside landscape. Like Bechtle, Hopper often eschews rendering the figure to focus instead on the places that people inhabit, usually depicted with a crisp precision and sparseness. Most notably, though, in Hopper's paintings is a certain mysterious luminosity and uncanny sense of place that leaves viewers with more questions than answers as to the scene's true purpose and meaning.
Reviewing Bechtle's 2005 retrospective, the artist and writer Richard Kalina summed up Bechtle's greatness and purpose within American art today:
"Bechtle grapples with serious issues of representation, but he does so in such a laboriously off-hand way that it takes a while for a viewer to realize what the artist is up to, and just how good he is. Bechtle has taken on the sorts of problems that artists of all representational stripes are dealing with these days -- particulary the transmutation of the photographic image--and he has, over a span of 40-odd years, come up with real answers. He has proven himself to be a first-rate painter, draftsman and printmaker, and as these recent shows make clear, someone to whom we should pay serious attention." (R. Kalima, "Matters of Fact," Art in America, October 2005, p. 137.)
Bechtle's most well-known subjects are those most iconic aspects of suburban southern California -- cars, sun chairs, well-manicured lawns and the people who inhabit them. In Watsonville Chairs, a tour-de-force painting of 1976, Bechtle pays as much exacting detail to the chairs and architecture of the enclosed sun deck as he does to the sole occupant of the scene. As in many of his paintings, his chairs take on a near-human quality, each with a different persona and liveliness. It is interesting to note, too, that Bechtle seems to gravitate toward the artificial, man-made leisure-time activities that became such a staple of suburban America in the 1960s and 70s. In his paintings, he pays as much attention to the tools and implements of our leisure - from cars to chairs - as he does the human occupants of the scene.
Formally speaking, Bechtle's work shares many affinities with the great American modern masters, most notably the painter Edward Hopper. Hopper's compositions often focus attention on formal qualities of architecture and the perceived bleakness of the American roadside landscape. Like Bechtle, Hopper often eschews rendering the figure to focus instead on the places that people inhabit, usually depicted with a crisp precision and sparseness. Most notably, though, in Hopper's paintings is a certain mysterious luminosity and uncanny sense of place that leaves viewers with more questions than answers as to the scene's true purpose and meaning.
Reviewing Bechtle's 2005 retrospective, the artist and writer Richard Kalina summed up Bechtle's greatness and purpose within American art today:
"Bechtle grapples with serious issues of representation, but he does so in such a laboriously off-hand way that it takes a while for a viewer to realize what the artist is up to, and just how good he is. Bechtle has taken on the sorts of problems that artists of all representational stripes are dealing with these days -- particulary the transmutation of the photographic image--and he has, over a span of 40-odd years, come up with real answers. He has proven himself to be a first-rate painter, draftsman and printmaker, and as these recent shows make clear, someone to whom we should pay serious attention." (R. Kalima, "Matters of Fact," Art in America, October 2005, p. 137.)