Keeping It Real

In 2006 a traveling retrospective of Robert Bechtle’s paintings, drawings and watercolors completed its cross-country tour at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. The show, which originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, included at least two dozen of the photorealist works that established this Bay Area artist’s reputation in the late 1960s and early 1970s: suburban scenes of cars parked in front of stucco houses and people standing in snapshotlike poses, all bathed in sun-bleached California light. Today his strikingly true-to-life scenes are remarkable not only for their well-crafted detail but for the sense of nostalgia they elicit. “Probably more than any other exhibition at the Corcoran during my tenure, the Bechtle show was loved virtually uniformly,” says Jonathan Binstock, formerly a curator at the museum and now an art adviser at Citigroup, in New York. “Artists, collectors and the general public all seemed moved and impressed.

Janet Bishop, a curator at SFMOMA who organized the Bechtle show there, observes that the retrospective has had a ripple effect on the artist’s reputation. “When I was initially visiting museums with Bechtles in their collections, the works had not been seen for a long time,” Bishop says. “Now he is slowly having a presence in those museums’ galleries.” She also notes that one of the works in the show, Watsonville Chairs, 1976, was the cover image of Christie’s First Open catalogue from last February; it was the top lot in the sale, bringing $396,000, close to the artist’s record of $408,000, paid for ’62 Chevy, 1970, in November 2006, also at Christie’s.

It’s not just Bechtle but also other photorealist artists who are being reevaluated, says Bishop, and not only in the salesroom. “This is a moment when photorealism is ripe for reconsideration,” she says. “Fellow curators are certainly interested.” The idea of photorealism as a movement fizzled, Bishop says, because the technically accomplished works gained such broad popular appeal “that the art world became suspicious. Now they are circling back with the realization that these are extraordinary paintings.”

In the early 1970s, artists such as Bechtle, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings and Philip Pearlstein strove to render scenes from daily life with optical precision. Their bravura paintings were termed photorealistic because of their technically daunting resemblance to photographic images, sometimes heightened by the use of an airbrush to create a seamless surface. Estes is known for visually complex urban scenes that shimmer with meticulously detailed reflections, like those in the glass-and-aluminum doors of his Telephone Booths, 1967. Cottingham focuses on signage from retail stores and theaters, which he often depicts in extreme close-up and on a large scale. Goings’s suburban streetscapes feature parked cars and pickup trucks and are presented as matter-of-factly as his meticulously painted arrangements of diner condiments—bottles of ketchup and hot sauce, jars of relish—on gleaming Formica tabletops. Pearlstein and Close concentrated on the human figure and portraiture, respectively, treating the flesh and features of their subjects in frank, unidealized ways. Flack is known mostly for still lifes in which paint tubes, brushes and other symbols of art making are arranged alongside traditional vanitas objects such as fruit, flowers, skulls and candles.

In its lens-sharp clarity, viewfinderlike cropping and happened-upon moments, photorealism reflected the new pervasiveness of photography in contemporary life. By the 1960s, the latter medium had altered the way people saw—and framed—the world. More and more, commercial photographs appeared in color; the Polaroid, meanwhile, brought color home to the personal snapshot. Even serious photographers were taking life’s most ordinary, incidental moments, both domestic and public, as their subject matter. In the late ’60s, the term “snapshot aesthetic” came to denote the commonplace quality that characterized these images, but the roots of the style can be traced to the previous decade and the work of Robert Frank. Frank’s photographs in the book The Americans were initially dismissed because of their raw, informal look. At first glance they seemed amateurish, but they possessed the same spontaneity and modesty as the work of the Beat poets and writers with whom he associated. Frank’s documentary approach paved the way for photographers like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, whose pictures reflected their personal experience of the world.