Robert Bechtle: a retrospective.

Charles, Ray

Robert Bechtle has enjoyed an art-critical second look of late. Often credited with being the first Photorealist, he has recently begun to receive the late-career respect afforded to figures of significance, and the current retrospective of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art should awaken viewers to this unlikely spawn of Pop's autistic literalness and Diebenkorn's Bay Area abstractions. As SF MOMA'S Janet Bishop points out in her essay for the catalogue, art history still lacks a place for the group of hyperrealist artists, from Richard Estes to Gerhard Richter, who coalesced in the late '60s. Perhaps the difficulty of seeing one of Bechtle's typical street or automobile paintings as anything more than a gimmicky photo-based imitation of painterly technique--a Shazam! to wow the philistines--is actually the fault of the Photorealist label itself, which surely hindered any nuanced view of Bechtle's particular styleless style. Looking anew at Bechtle, and recalling the work of younger artists, from Jeff Wall to Peter Cain to Charles Ray (who contributes an appreciative essay), one begins to see for the first time the strange, almost cinematic play of light and shadow, of reality and reflection, and above all, the seesaw of inexpressive detail and emotional nuance. Forget for a moment the photos (or, as Jonathan Weinberg discusses in his essay, the slides) that Bechtle used in making these paintings, and the uncanny production on canvas becomes a silent, eerie world of its own.--ED.

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ESSAYS BY JANET BISHOP, MICHAEL AUPING, JONATHAN WEINBERG, AND CHARLES RAY