Robert Bechtle

Teaching From 1965 to 1966, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley; and at the University of California, Davis, from 1967 to 1968.

Work Robert Bechtle, 61 Pontiac, (1968–1969). oil on canvas, 59 3/4 × 84 1/4 in. (151.8 × 214 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © 1969 Robert Bechtle Alongside artists John Baeder, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Richard McLean, Ralph Goings, Bechtle was considered to be one of the earliest Photorealists.

Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in 2005, when he first noticed a Bechtle painting in 1969, he was "rattled by the middle-class ordinariness of the scene". the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Retrospective exhibits In 2000, Oakland Museum of California held a retrospective exhibit of Bechtle's paintings, "California Classic: Realist Paintings by Robert Bechtle".

In 2005, a major retrospective exhibit and the first full–scale survey of the artist's work, "Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective", was organized and exhibited by SFMOMA, and travelled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Death Bechtle died of Lewy body dementia while in hospice in Berkeley, California, on September 24, 2020. He was 88 years old, and survived by his wife Whitney Chadwick, and his two children Max and Anne.