Photorealist painter of everyday scenes
Robert Bechtle, a master photorealist painter whose signature style often featured a Pontiac or Gran Torino station wagon parked in front of a Bay Area suburban home, died Thursday morning at a hospice care facility in Berkeley.
The cause of death was Lewy body syndrome, said his son, Max Bechtle. A longtime resident of Potrero Hill, Bechtle grew up in Alameda and lived in Northern California his entire life. He was 88.
Bechtle’s gift was to take a mundane scene and paint it to evoke a simple snapshot of a family and its car, or just a car in its driveway. When viewed from afar, often at the Whitney Museum of American Art or the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, it was if you were looking through a window at the real thing. But as the viewer got closer, the magic in the precise brushstrokes opened up. One of his most famous paintings, “Alameda Gran Torino, 1974” always draws a crowd when on display in the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Bechtle has a long relationship with SFMOMA and was the first artist to serve on the Board of Trustees, from 2006 to 2009.
“With the passing of Robert Bechtle, our community has lost one of its true greats,” said Janet Bishop, chief curator at SFMOMA.
Robert Alan Bechtle was born May 14, 1932, in San Francisco, and raised in Sacramento and Alameda.
His father, Otto Bechtle, was a telephone lineman who died when Bechtle was 12 and his brother Ken was 6.
Their mother, Thelma, supported them as a schoolteacher who had her own son in her fourthgrade class. By the time Bechtle reached Alameda High School, he was already an aspiring painter with his own easel, on encouragement of his mother and his aunt. He was editor of the school yearbook and graduated in 1950, having earned a scholarship to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
He had just earned his bachelor of fine arts and started a career as a commercial artist at Kaiser when he was drafted into the Army. Stationed in Berlin, Bechtle painted a mural for the mess hall and availed himself of the opportunity to visit every museum in Western Europe. Upon his release, he returned to CCAC, to earn his MFA on the G.I. Bill while working as an art director for the Kaiser Builder, a magazine for engineers. He received his MFA in 1958.
As he struggled to define his own style, Bechtle was always an art instructor, at CCAC and later in the famous art faculty at UC Davis. While teaching commercial art at CCAC, in the late 1950s he began a romance with one of his students, Nancy Dalton of Watsonville, who was studying illustration.
Bechtle confided in her that he could not decide what to paint. She said, “‘I’ve always heard that it is a good idea to paint what you know,’ and that is what he ultimately did,” she said. Among his first realistic works was Dalton at her dining room table looking out the window at night.
They were married in her parents’ home in 1963 and lived in a waterfront Alameda bungalow before moving to North
Berkeley in 1965. After many years teaching at CCAC, which became California College of the Arts, he moved to San Francisco State University, where he got tenure and taught for 30 years. Bechtle received an honorary doctorate from CCA in 2007.
In pursuit of his own style, Bechtle was rigid in avoiding imitation.
“He was looking at what other people were painting and not wanting to do the same thing,” said Max Bechtle.
According to his son, Bechtle was so determined to create his own unique style of representative painting that he was halfway through one picture when he saw a similar work by Richard Estes. He left that painting half finished, and it now hangs in the home of his son.
In the late 1960s, Bechtle was at the forefront of photorealism, along with Tom Blackwell, John Salt and Estes, but none of the others was as dedicated to everyday life. “He just painted what was around him,” said Max Bechtle. “Nothing fancy, just everyday stuff, but he painted it in intricate detail.”
A major oil painting like “Alameda Gran Torino” would take six months at his studio, which was usually in the backyard of his home in North Berkeley.
The reason he painted station wagons is that it’s what he drove, because he could load paintings in the back. In 1968, he purchased a new Volvo wagon from a dealership and was on his way to trade in the family 1961 Pontiac wagon when he decided to pose his family in front. He put his camera on the front stairs of the home and set the timer, then gathered Nancy and their two kids, Max and Anne, in front. He put his hand on the head of Max, who was 3 and prone to running off.
That picture became one of his most famous works.
Though Bechtle painted from photographs, he was so good that he could have done just as well from memory, said his contemporary and friend Wayne Thiebaud. “Drawing is the basis of all painting, and Bob was a supreme draftsman,” Thiebaud said. “I respected him very much as a serious, probing painter.”
In 1970, Bechtle came under the representation of Ivan Karp, a prominent New York dealer, who gave him a solo show in 1971. The next year, he was part of a group show of photorealists that toured Europe and solidified Bechtle’s reputation as a leader of the movement.
In 1980, the Bechtles were divorced and Bechtle moved to San Francisco and lived on Potrero Hill ever after, while summering in Westport Point, Mass., with his second wife, Whitney Chadwick, an art historian and author. Bechtle was always disciplined in working in his basement studio at home.
In 2017, he had his last show, drawings at Barbara Gladstone in New York. In preparation for that, he started to notice difficulty with his motor skills, and in the fall of 2018 he was diagnosed with Lewy body syndrome, an affliction marked by deteriorating physical or mental acuity. He could no longer paint and draw, but he still got up at 6 a.m. to take his morning walk around Potrero Hill. He would then spend his day listening to classical music, unless the 49ers or Giants were playing on TV.
“For all his accomplishments, he was very humble and never tooted his own horn,” said his daughter, Anne Higgins. “He was kind and softspoken, with a wry sense of humor until the end.”