Robert Alan Bechtle was an American painter, printmaker, and educator.
13 Facts About Robert Bechtle
1.
2.
Robert Bechtle lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life.
3.
Robert Bechtle's paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.
4.
Robert Alan Bechtle was born May 14,1932, in San Francisco, California, to parents Otto Bechtle and Thelma Bechtle.
5.
Robert Bechtle's mother was a school teacher and his father was an electrician.
6.
Robert Bechtle received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts and Crafts, in Oakland, California.
7.
Robert Bechtle began in lithography but, after 1982 when Crown Point Press and Kathan Brown began publishing his prints, worked mainly in etching.
8.
Alongside artists John Baeder, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Richard McLean, Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle was considered to be one of the earliest Photorealists.
9.
Robert Bechtle's paintings reveal his perspective on how things look to him, the color, and the light of a commonplace scene.
10.
Robert Bechtle's painting "'61 Pontiac", feature an image of himself, his first wife Nancy Elizabeth and their two young children in front of a car.
11.
Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in 2005, when he first noticed a Robert Bechtle painting in 1969, he was "rattled by the middle-class ordinariness of the scene".
12.
Robert Bechtle died of Lewy body dementia while in hospice in Berkeley, California, on September 24,2020.
13.
Robert Bechtle was 88 years old, and survived by his wife Whitney Chadwick, and his two children Max and Anne.