Californian Robert Bechtle is one of the leading members of a distinct West Coast group of new realist or, as the movement is also called, photo-realist painters that includes Don Eddy, Ralph Goings, Richard McLean, and Paul Wonner, to name several of the better known. With his 1964 oil, '56 Chrysler, Bechtle was in fact the first artist of that region to produce a "true" photo-realist painting. "True" is obviously not to say that he was the only artist at the time working realistically, but rather that he had already grasped the aesthetic premise of a new contemporary style. With its roots partly in pop art, it is characterized by a dispassionate look at current popular society, a cognizance of the cluttered urban environment, and a preoccupation with gaudy material possessions and commercial objects: motor vehicles, storefronts, billboards, marquees and shop signs, toys, geegaws, and the like. The various artists penchant for incisive, sharp-focus realism is likewise an outgrowth of modern business and technology. As Bechtle unashamedly admits:

"Pop Art led to an awareness of commercial art techniques which is where the license for use of photographs and projectors came from for me."

To the surprise of few, the new realists indeed usually employ opaque or slide projectors to throw a photographic image onto a canvas or paper while they meticulously trace the forms, highlights, and shadows. Is it cheating? No; these artists would contend that advertising designers use such tricks all the time and that the camera therefore is as acceptable a tool to do art as a calculator is to do mathematics. Using an airbrush to reproduce the smooth gradations of tone is also a typical new realist effect. Little wonder then that most of their paintings are astonishingly like snapsnot enlargements; it is latter-day trompe l'oeil!

Nonetheless, each new realist artist has his or her values, points-of-view, and rendering mannerisms that set apart the work of one from the other. Bechtle is different chiefly in two ways: Unlike those who so minimize their brushwork as to simulate the slick or matte finish of photo printing, Bechtle's surfaces do not hide the method of paint application, remaining ever-so-slightly tactile. Second, he edits his visual information; he does not insist that every element or object in a composition be given equal importance or focus. "I see my paintings," he has said, "as being essentially still lifes that deal with such classical concerns as balance, shape, color, tension, et cetera." And though Bechtle relates to the scenes he paints and cannot help but have made editorial pre-judgments in the selection and organization of topic imagery, he avoids dramatics or romanticizing, praise or ridicule. He endeavors to remain characteristically new realist neutral.

Bechtle has been predominately concerned with two topics. The automobile is a central motif in many of his paintings. Accordingly he has noted: "The automobile is a very important part of our life, probably the most important single object -- especially here in California." One sees a car parked in the driveway at the right of the Hunter's Sunset Painter of 1981. Essentially, however, the smoothly brushed watercolor is representative of Bechtle's other favored study -- the sun-bathed suburban communities of the San Francisco Bay area, (including the residential district called Sunset, hence the designation in the title), with their homogeneous middle-class stucco and frame dwellings. Usually the scene is set at mid-depth, with frontal, even lighting and bland, soft colors. As a camera often foreshortens the illusion of three-dimensionality, so the houses here overlap, producing a pattern of geometric shapes unavoidably reminiscent of Hopper, an admiration for whose work Bechtle acknowledges. Hopper-like, too, is the painting's subjective quietude.

In 1984 Bechtle again took inspiration from the Sunset neighborhood for his large (56 x 120 inch) oil on canvas -- or more accurately, three laterally abutted canvases -- Sunset Intersection. The scene is dominated by a wide, almost empty residential street that recedes in one-point perspective. Strong diagonals leading to the vanishing point at off-center-left reinforce an illusion of deep space. At the same time, the artist "contrapuntally" develops the surface plane through his characteristic foreshortening, use of flat, unmodeled shapes, and by the curious long, horizontal, overhead telephone wires that effectively lace all three panels together. But why the seemingly contrived triptych device? Perhaps it was just whim -- though Bechtle has made each section a remarkably adequate, independent composition, with pictorial business all its own. The novelty, then, maybe in demonstrating that the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts.

ArtNews magazine critic Eric Jay reads Sunset Intersection in sober philosophical terms that Bechtle may or may not have consciously considered:

"In a mysterious chasm at the end of the boulevard is a solid sheet of blue sea. This is where Bechtle leaves us: secure and comfortable in our surroundings, facing an unsure drop. The intersection is that of life and death, the eternal present and the finite future."

Bechtle was born in San Francisco in 1932. He attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he received a B.A. in 1954 and an M.F.A. in 1958. He has taught at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis. He is on the faculty of San Francisco State University and lives in Berkeley.