Robert Bechtle
Robert Bechtle (born May 14, 1932 in San Francisco , California , USA ; † September 24, 2020 in Berkeley , California, USA) was an American contemporary painter , graphic artist and important exponent of photorealism . He lived in San Francisco.
Life
Robert Alan Bechtle studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland , California from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of California in Berkeley , California from 1960 to 1961 .
Bechtle spent his entire life in the San Francisco Bay Area and the focus of his art was to reproduce the scenes of everyday life there. He began drawing as a teenager with the support of his teachers and his family and consistently pursued his career as an artist. Bechtle won a scholarship that financed his first year of college.
After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), he joined the US Army in Berlin , where he painted murals for the canteen and visited European museums. In addition to his paintings, watercolors and drawings, he also became a well-known graphic artist: he worked as a lithographer at the beginning of his career and after 1982 mainly with etchings published by Crown Point Press. Robert Bechtle taught at San Francisco State University from 1978 to 1999. Bechtle lived and worked in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.
Robert Bechtle was one of the earliest photo realists along with Richard Estes , Chuck Close and Ralph Goings . In the mid-1960s he began to find his own style and theme, which he cultivated for a lifetime. He drew his inspiration from his local area in San Francisco, he painted the environment, his friends and family and the street scenes. He paid special attention to cars. Bechtle's brushwork is hardly detectable in the pictures, they look like photos.
In 1972 he participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the Realism department . 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, as well as the Walker Art Center , the Smithsonian Institution and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art .
Robert Bechtle was elected member (NA) of the National Academy in 1994.
He died on September 24, 2020 at the age of 88.
Literature and Sources
- Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today ; Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972
- documenta archive (ed.); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972 ; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X
Web links
- Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York
- Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco
- Crown Point Press in San Francisco, CA
- Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York
- Examples of his works
- Materials by and about Robert Bechtle in the documenta archive
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Robert Bechtle, Photorealist Painter of the Everyday Middle Class, Dies at 88. In: kqed.org. Retrieved September 25, 2020 .
- ↑ nationalacademy.org: Living Academicians "B" (accessed March 15, 2015)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bechtle, Robert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bechtle, Robert Alan |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American painter and printmaker |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 14, 1932 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | San Francisco , California, USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 24, 2020 |
| Place of death | Berkeley , California, USA |