Robert Bechtle valuation

Robert Bechtle (1932–2020) was born in San Francisco and grew up in Alameda. He earned a BFA in 1954 and an MFA in 1958 at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and from 1968 he taught at San Francisco State University. He began under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area figuration and Pop Art, and by the mid-1960s had settled on the style he kept from then on: Photorealist paintings made from his own photographs of family, friends, suburban houses, street scenes and parked cars. He was among the earliest Photorealists, alongside Richard Estes, Chuck Close and Ralph Goings. His painting '61 Pontiac, in which he posed with his wife and children, is in the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also made watercolours, drawings and prints, first lithographs and, from 1982, mainly etchings published by Crown Point Press. The Oakland Museum of California showed his work in 2000, and in 2005 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised his first full retrospective. He lived and worked in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood of San Francisco.

His work includes unique paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints. At Crown Point Press he made nineteen etchings printed in editions and thirty-seven monotypes. For a print, check the edition number, signature, paper and publisher; for a watercolour or drawing, look for fading, foxing or staining. A painting should come with a gallery invoice and the date of the work.