Robert Bechtle: New Work

NEW WORK SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ROBERT BECHTLE : NEW WORK SEPTEMBER 10 - DECEMBER 1, 1991 Born in San Francisco in 1932, Robert Bechtle studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and since 1968 has taught painting at San Francisco State University. In the late sixties and early seventies, when Bechtle became well-known nationally, his work was usually seen together with that of Richard Estes, Chuck Close, and Malcolm Morley, among others, as representing a new style called Photo Realism or New Realism. Although the relationship of Bechtle's work to photography was evident and much remarked upon, critical discussion generally centered on its subject matter-ordinary views of suburban streets and houses, occasionally with their inhabitants-and the artist's resolute avoidance of the heroic stance associated with Abstract Expressionism.1 Yet Bechtle, more than the other Photo Realim, chose to paint a particular kind of photograph, the ordinarysnapshot of his family, for example, posed in front of a station wagon. His choice was no accident, as he explained at the time: "When I'm photographing a car in front of a house I try to keep in mind what a real estate photographer would do if he were taking a picture of the house and try for that quality." 2 Other Photo Realists. to be sure, made paintings from photographs that could have been snapshots. But in the paintings themselves, only Bechtle's had the atmosphere of ordinary, family photographs because he purposely avoided the virtuoso effects that for the most part characterized the work of his colleagues. Although Bechtle was probably unaware of it, at about the same time in Southern California another artist, John Baldessari, was making photographs of typical street scenes which he had printed directly on canvas. A more distant parallel, one whose work Bechtle would not have known, was the German artist Gerhard Richter, who in 1962 began to paint black and white photographs he had found in newspapers and books, and after 1966 often worked from snapshots he had made himself. Because of the way they were painted or; in Baldessari's case, printed, one would never mistake a work of Bechtle's for a Richter or a Baldessari. Nevertheless. by basing his paintings on snapshots as they did. Bechtle chose to situate his work outside the boundaries of painting as it had traditionally been practiced seeming to leave aside such issues as composition, color, and formal invention, as all of these had been determined the moment the camera's shutter was released. Bechtle's paintings were thus akin to Marcel Duchamp's Ready-mades, outside the realm of aesthetic choice and taste, whether good or bad, inherently insignificant in their subject matter, and alto gether beyond the issues of style. The experience of looking at one of Bechtle's paintings is of course quite different from seeing the photo-paintings of Richter or Baldessari. For one thing, the photographic image in their work is difficult to read, deliberately blurred in Richter's case, imperfectly registered in the transfer to canvas in the case of Baldessari. In both we realize at once that we are encountering a highly conditional image, one that refers as much to the printed media they are taken from or inspired by as to what is in the photographs themselves. In Bechtle's paintings, on the other hand, we see with absolute clarity, as if we were in the presence of reality itself. Because photographs convey so much information, and because Parking Garage with Impala. 1990 Bechtle has been so successful at transferring much of that information to canvas, his paint ings seem to be-and to some extent are-entirely objective, and we tend to give them the concentrated, allover attention that we give to photographs. It is as if they were snapshots, enormously enlarged and taken by someone other than ourselves, and our first response to them is almost like an intense, but nonsexual, voyeurism. We recognize the familiar subjects immediately because they are familiar streets and cars of the sort we know well in our own lives, and we believe the paintings to be not only real. but somehow true. Yet because the works are paintings, which our experience suggests almost invariably depict people or events either of unusual interest or in a striking or revealing way, our expectations are heightened, and we anticipate finding something both true and significant. What we find, of course, is what we already know: a reality that, though being some one else's, is more or less the same as our own. Where we expect a message, there is none, and we are left with the same world we encounter everyday. Inevitably, there is a moment ofdisappointment, as we discover nothing but our own world, untransformed by the Roman tic or Expressionist conventions we have come to expect from art. Yet the very ordinariness of Bechtle's vision is in some ways its point, and at the same time the source of its contem poraneity. What you see in his art is in fact what you get in lifo itself. Bechtle's paintings, like the early work of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella, are entirely honest in their relationship to the world and their refusal to use art for transcendental purposes. Over the years, Bechtle's work has changed, but not greatly. An early critic, Carter Ratcliff, found that "these pictures would be empty if it weren't for the bright California light which Bechtle manages to bring (via high-toned, warm color) from the photo to the canvas. I wonder if his concern isn't with this light, and if his subject matter isn't chosen (by the camera- the artist as photographer) not for itself but for its usefulness in making this light credible.''l Since then, Bechtle's concern with light has grown. In the late sixties and early seventies the light in his paintings tended to be frontal and pervasive, without any real indication of a particular time of day. In his more recent work he often uses back and side lighting for interior scenes (which were themselves quite rare in his earlier paintings), and his landscapes tend to be set in the early morning or late afternoon, when shadows are more visible and light itself is sometimes an important presence. Today Bechtle sometimes paints what could be called portraits-of himself, his wife, and their friends. Although the artist and his family sometimes appeared in the early work, they tended to be generic figures, stand-ins for the typical American couple and their children in their own snapshots. Now we encounter genuine likenesses of real individuals in his work. Overall, what could be seen as the conceptual bent of Bechtle's earlier work has lessened somewhat in favor of a more traditional realism as the snapshot quality of the photographs he paints is sometimes reduced, and as the figures in his paintings become less posed and more active, and even seem to have their own interior lives. At times Bechtle's current work comes close to that of the great realist painters he has alwaysadmired (Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper are especially near in some works in this exhibition), and his art contradicts our expectations less often. We are always, after all, more comfortable in the artist's studio than fixed in an empty street or parking lot. Now. instead of a street Bechtle tends to paint a neighborhood, or at least a row of houses, and the light has become a warm, almost reassuring presence.Yet in some works, such as Parking Garage with Impala, we seem to be back in the bleak but altogether familiar world Bechtie painted two decades ago. Th is time, however; we can enter the space instead of simply interrogating the plethora of details transferred from the photograph, and the single Chevrolet, standing alone in a vast and unpleasant multilevel parking garage, seems to be a surrogate for our own, often-repeated experience. Taken together, Bechtle's new work suggests that he has acquired a wary human ism that encompasses at once the banal desolation of much of contemporary life, the visual, sensual pleasures of California light, and the reassuring presence of other human beings. John Caldwell Curator of Pointing and Sculpture 1. William C. Seitz, for example, de~ribed Bechtle's content as a "qLJietly ironic submission to the Nixonian era:' "The Real and the Artificial: Painting of the New Environment:' Art in America 60, no. 6 (November/ December 1972): 71. 2. Brian O'Doherty, "The Photo Real im: 12 Interviews;· Ibid, 74. 3.Carter Ratcliff. "New York;' Art lnternotionol 14. no. 4 (April 1970): 68. Cover: Potrero intersection- 20th and Arko mos, 1990 ROBERT BECHTLE SELECTED GROUP Born in San Francisco, 1932 EXHIBITIONS Lives and works in San Francisco 1957 Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California Oakland Art Museum EDUCATION 1959 California College of Ans and Crafcs, B.A., 1954 San Francisco Museum of Arc California College of Arts and Crafts. M.F.A.. 1960 1958 Wi.1ter Invitational. California Palace of che Legion Universicy of California, Berkeley, 1960, 1961 of Honor. San Francisco (Summer Sessions) 1964 San Francisco Museum of Arc INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS 1966 1965 East Bay Realists, San Francisco Art lnsticute Richmond Art Cente1; Richmond, California 1967 Berkeley Gallery. Berkeley The Artist os His Subiect. Museum of Modern Art, 1966 New York E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento Annuol Exhibition of Contemporary American 1967 Painting. Whitney Muse um of American Arc, New Berkeley Gallery, San Francisco York (catalogue) San Francisco Museum of Art 1968 Davis Art Cente1; Davis.

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