Oral history interview with Robert Bechtle, 2010 February 8-9 Funding for this interview was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Robert Bechtle on February 8 and 9, 2010. The interview took place at 871 de Haro Street, San Francisco, California, and was conducted by Judith Olch Richards for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Funding for this interview was provided by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Robert Bechtle and Judith Olch Richards have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview JUDITH RICHARDS: This is Judith Richards interviewing Robert Bechtle on February 8, 2010, on 871 de Haro Street, San Francisco [CA], for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc one. This interview takes up from more or less where a previous archives interview left off, that concluded in February 1980. And so, roughly starting from there, I wanted to just set up some basic facts. At that point, you were living in Berkeley, but I think shortly after you moved from Berkeley to San Francisco. Did you move to the place we are here on de Haro Street? ROBERT BECHTLE: No, actually we lived for, I guess, six or seven years in the same neighborhood but in a different location. We were on a street called Pennsylvania Avenue. It's about 10 blocks from here. It was when Whitney and I were first - MS. RICHARDS: Your wife's name is Whitney Chadwick. MR. BECHTLE: Chadwick, yeah. And then 1980, 1979 I mean, that was when I separated from my first wife, Nancy, and when Whitney and I started to live together and then got married. So 1980 is the year that I think of as a sort of watershed, and I think we moved into the place on Pennsylvania in 1980. MS. RICHARDS: Did you have a separate studio at that point? MR. BECHTLE: At that point I did, yeah. I rented a space - because of overlapping events, I rented a space in Emeryville, which is on the other side of the bay. It was because I was still keeping a lot of contacts in Berkeley and my kids were there and so on. So Emeryville is a little industrial suburb. It's kind of between Oakland and Berkeley. It's also the first exit when you cross the bridge, so it's actually a very easy - at that time anyway - a very easy commute from the Potrero Hill neighborhood, which is kind of the first exit on this - on the San Francisco side of the bridge. You could get from here to there in like 20 minutes, and you can certainly count on it being pretty much the same. But then over time that commute got more and more difficult as more and more traffic was becoming an issue. MS. RICHARDS: That's the studio that was on Horton Street? MR. BECHTLE: That was on Horton Street, yeah. It was a - there was an artist co-op there that had the, kind of, master lease on three buildings, and so all of us that had studios there, we rented from the co-op. We were members of the co-op. MS. RICHARDS: Did you find it because of artist friends who were already there? MR. BECHTLE: Yeah, I did. I guess a former student that - yeah, I was in need of studio space, so I asked about it, and they said, "Oh, come on and see what - MS. RICHARDS: That was a change from working in your own home? MR. BECHTLE: Yeah, I've had studios away from home and studios at home, you know, over the years alternately. So, at that particular time, I had had a studio in Berkeley that was originally a small garage, two-car garage, that I had remodeled into a studio with a high ceiling and skylights and so on. But then when I left Berkeley, I needed to find another place to work. And, you know, for various reasons, Emeryville seemed like a good choice, partly because space was more available over there than it is in the city. It's very difficult to find studio space here, you know, and it was very cheap. And it was kind of a neat community, mostly younger artists. But some went on to become well-known. MS. RICHARDS: For example? MR. BECHTLE: Oh, Richard Misrach, for one. I don't think he has a studio there anymore, but he was one of the people that was there. And Bill Fontana, a sound sculptor, was there. And I can't think of anybody else that became famous, but - MS. RICHARDS: Was it a kind of a community, I mean, in the sense - MR. BECHTLE: It was, yeah. Yeah. Eventually the group was able to negotiate with the city of Emeryville for some kind of financing to purchase the buildings as a - I forget what they called it - a limited equity co-op, which meant that you - if you had bought a space in it, you could sell the space back to the co-op for what you paid for it, plus whatever improvements you made on it, but you couldn't put it on the open market and speculate in terms of real estate, you know, what its market value might be, which was perfect for that kind of a setup because that meant that the purchase prices were very low and people were able to afford it. I moved out just when that was taking place, and the person that rented the space when I had purchased it, and he's still there. I mean, he's still doing it. MS. RICHARDS: How long did you have a studio there? MR. BECHTLE: I think it was about seven years. It seemed to go in seven-year cycles, for some reason. MS. RICHARDS: During this period of time, the early '80s, I saw in the various publications a number of charcoal drawings. Have you - did working in charcoal begin earlier, and how did it relate to watercolors and oils that you were using? MR. BECHTLE: Well - MS. RICHARDS: I mean, there is a distinct - MR. BECHTLE: I think I did the first of the, sort of, an ongoing series of charcoal drawings sometime in the mid- '70s. MS. RICHARDS: The earliest one in the retrospective was 1979, but, of course, I didn't know if that was necessarily the first one. MR. BECHTLE: I can't remember which one - it might have been. Although I think that there were a couple that would have been, you know, '77, maybe '78. And I'm not sure why I started [laughs]. MS. RICHARDS: I was asking because, of course, the precision of your work, the precision that you chose to put into your work, both the paintings in oil and watercolor, would seem to be contradictory to the medium of charcoal, and yet you use it in a very precise way, and it seems so perfectly attuned also to the kind of - rather than graphite, perhaps. MR. BECHTLE: Well, I think the - MS. RICHARDS: I was wondering how you found your way to charcoal and how you came to use the technique, the touch that you use, that you have. MR. BECHTLE: Good question [laughs]. I mean, there were a few earlier drawings in the '60s, which were graphite. So I guess there was a kind of an urge to work monochromatically, and there were things that I felt you could do in a drawing that made sense in the '60s. You could make shortcuts happen or combine, you know, color with black and white and so on in ways that didn't make sense in bigger paintings - oil paintings. But at some point charcoal suggested itself, and I honestly don't remember why. It was kind of like a challenge to see if I could do it. Why I was interested in doing it, you know, I'm not sure. The first ones, I was using the kind of tradition of smudging the charcoal but using those paper blending stomps, the, sort of, French stomps. And then after the first one of those, which seemed to work well, then I started experimenting a little bit with different ways of working it, using, in some cases, Conté pencils, which gives it a denser black. I think when I tried using something called Wolff pencils, which are carbon but not quite as black as Conté, those didn't really seem to lend themselves to the stomping, so they were more using the grain of the texture of the paper to create the halftone. And I guess I found that by using charcoal pencils, which were a little harder than the stick charcoal, and keeping them sharpened, I could make it work with charcoal as well. And so most of them are done that way, that is, using charcoal pencils without any stomping. Every once in a while I'll decide to maybe go back and try doing one with the stomping, just because maybe for a particular image it seems appropriate; I don't know. But, you know, I was very taken, years before this, by the wonderful Conté drawings that [Georges] Seurat did.