Robert Bechtle
American (San Francisco, California, 1932)Alameda Gran Torino
For more than forty years Bechtle has pursued a quiet realism based on the things he knows best — family, cars, houses, neighborhoods — translating what seem to be ordinary scenes of middle-class American life into extraordinary paintings. He works from photographs of familiar subjects (his family and home, for example) to depict precise moments in time. Despite their photographic origins, however, his canvases are resolutely and finally about painting. Underneath the smooth sheen of their surfaces lies a textured web of strokes and dabs, where abstract shapes meet edges to form an intricate, layered view of our environment.
Bechtle has often spoken of the "dumbness" of his car paintings; the images seem so everyday as to be meaningless. Yet they are anything but ordinary "snapshots." As an artist with roots in the California middle class, Bechtle recognized both the cultural significance of cars and the relative dearth of artistic representations of them. The pristine gloss of his automobile paintings suggests advertising images, though he typically depicts family cars, such as this station wagon, in mundane settings. While he sometimes portrays them as members of the family, here the car appears as a discrete entity. Its isolation lends an uneasiness to the scene: if automobiles exist to move people, then this car's utter stillness emphasizes the absence of passengers.
Keywords
station wagons, cars, suburbs, driveways, realism, Photorealism
This resource represents a portion of SFMOMA's collection. Information about the artworks presented here is subject to revision. Please contact us at collections@sfmoma.org to verify information. If you are planning to visit SFMOMA, please note that not all artworks are on view at all times.
This resource is for educational use and its contents may not be reproduced without permission. Please review our Terms of Use for more information.
