The marvellous in the familiarRobert Bechtle, everyday culture and the Californian lifestyle

Henri Lefebvre writes of Charles Baudelaire’s passionate immersion in the everyday, particularly evident in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. Baudelaire, he claims, is unique amongst his 19th century contemporaries in attacking the everyday on its own level, ‘as if from within’, discerning the eternal within the contingency of the times:

When the eternal appears in the circumstantial – the marvellous in the familiar – the result is a beautiful work of art.

Lefebvre explains what Baudelaire expects of the painter of modern life:

That he should embrace the hostile crowd, contemplate the ‘stone landscapes’ of great cities as though they were a new nature at the heart of art and artifice, that he should perceive the eternal in the transitory, and above all in the most fleeting moments. He wants the artist to confront the everyday – and even if necessary to tear through it to reveal the living spirit enshrouded within, not above, or beyond, but within – and in doing so to liberate something strange, mysterious and bizarre…

This notion, as Lefebvre puts it, ‘of seeing the mystery traced like a watermark beneath the transparent surface of the familiar world’ is, I will argue, a useful way of approaching the work of Robert Bechtle.

Robert Bechtle, Fosters Freeze, Alameda, 1970

Bechtle has himself recognised a slippage in his depictions of the everyday:

I know there is something odd about these images but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m not sure whether it is something that is there that I see or something that isn’t.

It’s got me thinking about how the ordinary is often a cover for something. …It’s this in-between… this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one – which is really the realm of the artist.

Somehow, Bechtle’s paintings, however detailed and illusionistic, point beyond the tangible world they depict – and, in the process, produce out of their eventlessness uncanny narratives of everyday life that shift between both its plenitude and its emptiness.

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Robert Bechtle, '56 Cadillac, 1966

Born in Alameda County in the Bay Area in 1932 and still active as a painter, Bechtle has lived most of his life in and around the suburbs and districts of San Francisco in Northern California. Having studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the late 1950s, he went on to teach there and then at San Francisco State University. He is still best known as one of the leaders of a new form of realism, ultimately labelled Photo-Realism, which he is said to have initiated with his 1964 painting ’61 Pontiac. A major retrospective of his work over the following four decades was held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, along with smaller shows of his drawings and prints at two sister galleries. This has finally made possible a full appreciation of Bechtle’s achievement – not a particularly prolific painter, much of his work is, it seems, in private hands. It was the catalogue from this exhibition that introduced me to his work – I found it in a secondhand bookshop during my hunt for material for a course on American Realist Art – and it was a good find.

Behind my academic enterprise here – which is to situate Bechtle’s art in the everyday and to explore its contribution to our understanding of everyday aesthetics – is a deep enjoyment and personal involvement in these paintings and drawings, even though I have seen few in the flesh, as it were, apart from three paintings, including his more well-known painting entitled ’61 Pontiac, from 1967-68, that were included in the Hayward Gallery show, The Painting of Modern Life: 1960s to Now a couple of years ago. One of the challenges I – and you now – face is trying to see past the apparent photographicness of these reproductions to the paintings they

depict. In fact, it is not that hard. Unlike most if not all of the other founders and later followers of Photo-Realism, Bechtle is not concerned to produce trompe l’oeil, rather airless and shiny painted versions of photographs. His use of photography is, in essence, an extension of its long historical use, as a sketching aid. He takes, he says, deliberately bad photographs; this frees him to create art out of the subject matter he selects and they dutifully record.

An early assessment of Photo-Realism, in Gregory Battock’s Super Realism: A Critical Anthology from 1975, argued that these painters offered ‘a universe of phenomenon from which all traces of the numinous has been drained’. This point alone should excuse Bechtle from the ranks of what still is a critically disparaged school of realist painting. However, apart (I hope) from playing a small part in rescuing Bechtle from such dubious company, this paper is not about art history. Much could be said elsewhere about the emergence of this realist movement nationally alongside New Abstraction, about Bechtle’s debt to Bay Area Figuration and the inescapable influence of Richard Diebenkorn, about Bechtle’s place in the art of the American West, with its ‘romantic realist’ heritage of paintings of pueblos and teepees, or about the relationship of Bechtle’s work to that of contemporaries such as Wayne Thiebaud.

Robert Bechtle, Alameda Chrysler, 1981

Instead, I will focus on Bechtle’s oeuvre as a late twentieth-century (and still continuing) version of the ‘painting of modern life’ – of seeking out the marvellous in the familiar. In doing this, I will draw on more recent thinking about the everyday, inspired by Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, as well as theories around space, but I will also acknowledge those who

simply like the work. One is the New Yorker art critic, Peter Shjeldahl, a longterm supporter who thinks Bechtle is still underrated. His review of the artist’s 2005 retrospective ended with this suggestive statement:

Life is incredibly complicated, and the proof is that when you confront any simple, stopped part of it you are stupefied.

Shjeldahl is attesting here to the fact that, as Arto Haapala has written, ‘in the context of art the everyday loses its everydayness: it becomes something extraordinary’.

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In terms of form and content, Bechtle’s work is steeped in the everyday – any mysteries that can be traced are to be found beneath or within the ‘stone landscapes’ of suburban California and the white middle-class culture they have helped to shape and contain. Alameda, his first great subject, was developed out of ranchland as a trolley-car suburb for San Francisco in the late 19th century. Termed an extension or addition back then, its mixed residential and commercial areas were built to take advantage of electric streetcar lines, so that the upper-middle class could live in ‘bourgeois utopia’ while continuing to work in the centre. These twelve and a half square miles now house around 72,000 relatively prosperous people; the latest figures show only 6% families live under the poverty line.

As this history indicates, the development of suburbs was not a post-World War II phenomenon but part of a much earlier process of urbanisation. As a built environment and a social space, the suburb is as central to understanding urban space and modern times as the city, yet until relatively recently the discourse about urban modernity has been dominated by the metropolis – and the suburb relegated often to a sitcom stereotype of conformity and repression – in terms looked at later, as thin space compared to the thick space of the city.

Robert Bechtle, California Garden I, 1972

In his revisionist study, Visions of Suburbia, Roger Silverstone argues that for many millions ‘the experience of modernity was the experience not of the street, but of the road, not the sidewalk but the lawn, and not the jarring and unpredictable visibility of private spaces and public transport, but the enclosed private worlds of fences, parlours and automobiles’.

Everyday life, as we generally define it now, was also a product of modernity, of the patterns and repetitions of an industrialised mass society, but it took two distinct forms, which are analogous to the dichotomies Silverstone itemises: the street and the home. Ben Highmore, a theorist of the everyday, counterposes Baudelaire’s heroic realm of modernity, where ‘we’ parry the shocks of the new and encounter marvellous adventures on the street’ with ‘the realm of the repetitions, of habit, and the lack of value’, perhaps best typified by Levittown and rapid mid-century suburban development. What Silverstone, as an urban historian and Bechtle, as an artist share is a sense that this everyday produced in the suburbs has value, both social and aesthetic.

Bechtle’s subject matter is very much ‘the enclosed private worlds of fences, parlours and automobiles’. It is close to home and, a word to come back to, familiar. The people in Bechtle’s paintings are almost always members of his own family or neighbours, who live in the faintly Spanish stucco bungalows, built back in the 1920s and 1930s, and who, according to Bechtle, ‘don’t move out’. The painter, too, is attached to this place, almost organically:

These images are about where and how I and my family have lived. It may not be perfect, but it’s not something I can turn my back on. To a considerable extent, I am a product of this place.

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Robert Bechtle, '61 Pontiac, 1964

In what was hailed as the first Photo-Realist painting, ’61 Pontiac, which Bechtle painted in 1964, the Alameda community is framed by the artist working on his painting of his own car, parked outside his house. There is a sense here, I think, of a multiplication of interiors – the empty car that will soon fill with family members, becoming a kind of mobile home; the other houses opposite, homes with their own windows looking out onto the same domesticated suburban scene.

Robert Bechtle, '60 T-Bird, 1967-68 - detail

As its title suggests, however, the car is, if perhaps not the main subject, the object that particularises the image. Most of the paintings that Bechtle made over the next decade and a half had similarly car-specific

titles, even when a person figures in the image, as in ’60 T-Bird (featuring Bechtle’s brother) (1967). As one Murilee Martin comments on Jalopnik.com – ’Obsessed With The Cult Of Cars’:

Some may say [Bechtle’s] work reflects the inherent contradictions in the American Dream, with overtones of postwar ennui, but we know it’s really about the cars.

An object of complex cultural importance, particularly in California, the car in Bechtle’s paintings is not the hot-rod or the pristine model in the brochure (or, for that matter, the same machine that inspired artists in Southern California like Judy Chicago) but something ordinary and unidealized that is, nevertheless, crucial to, and perhaps emblematic of, the local community – its domesticated status clear in Bechtle’s mother’s proprietory stance, leaning on the Alameda Chrysler (1981). The car was also something that Bechtle thought ‘nobody was painting’, an object that was so ubiquitous and ordinary that it could easily be overlooked as a subject of fine art.

Robert Bechtle, Alameda Chrysler, 1981

In defining the everyday, Michael Sheringham argues that it is not simply about particular things – one might think of cars, certainly an everyday object in a Californian middle-class suburb. Rather, everyday things like cars form part of ‘manifold lived experience’, elements within a quotidianity that implies community – the repetition of them through all of Bechtle’s work does not stale. Cars are things, in the sense developed by Albert Borgmann in his theorising of a social aesthetic of space – that is, they are artefacts which are inseparable from a social context and they

shape our everyday sense of place. Things are opposed to ‘devices’, mass technologies that make ‘no demands on our skill, strength, or attention’.

Robert Bechtle, Xmas in Gilroy, 1971

Andrew Light extend this theory to space – thick spaces, constituted by things, give us a sense of place. The suburbs are often considered thin spaces but Light argues that we need to explore the complexity of suburban space – what Bechtle has called the ‘hum’ of ordinary things. Things with which we have social relations become familiar and familiar things and everyday activities are, as Arto Haapala argues, ‘at the very heart of place’.

Familiarizing oneself with the environment is home building in the sense that home is by definition of utmost familiarity. …Home is something where most of the matters are under control. …The familiarity and control obviously diminish as one steps outside the door, but still one is on top of things in the sense that she or he does not have to face strangeness.

Haapala’s insight resonates in considering the central importance of home and familiarity in Bechtle’s subject matter, as well as in the detailed control he exerts over that subject matter. This is built into the form of his paintings as well as the content.

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Although Bechtle does not aim to reproduce photographs in his paintings, their frequent resemblance to snapshots does raise some interesting questions about how we read the paintings. One important aspect is the reference the artist thus makes towards the everyday practices of vernacular photography, particularly in terms of the pose and the family photo album. In virtually all his pictures, including those of deserted streets and parked cars, Bechtle ‘poses’ his subjects – the photographs he takes as source material are not of ‘the decisive moment’ but of moments that stretch out before and after the shutter opens.

Robert Bechtle, '61 Pontiac, 1968-69

Here is that ’61 Pontiac again, the Bechtle’s family car, this time with the family standing in front of it. Begun in 1968 and completed in the following year, this painting demonstrates both its place in the genre of traditional portraiture, not so different in their admittedly more modest display of wealth and comfort from the subjects of 18th century painters like Thomas Gainsborough, and its cousinship to the snap in the family album.

Robert Bechtle, Agua Caliente Nova, 1975

Even where the pose is less formal, as in Agua Caliente Nova (1975), a rare sightseeing excursion to the natural world, Bechtle’s wife and his two young children seem awkwardly conscious of the camera, as (we surmise) the father raises it to memorialise the family against the spectacular backdrop for yet another photo for the family album. Nature is just a painted backdrop here. The everyday dominates, both in the human activity and in the cars filling half the picture area.

Another trip out, this time to the Monterey Bay area, a hundred miles south of San Francisco, returns us to the suburban – this time the patio, a domestic outdoor space that spawned an entire postwar subculture of everyday exoticism, where a family relation poses informally. Watsonville Olympia (1977) evokes what has been termed the snapshot aesthetic, notably by including the clumsily intrusive back of the patio chair in the foreground, the sort of detail you might overlook as you focused on capturing the woman’s smile. The fact that the painter has deliberately incorporated this floral punctum (to use Barthes’ terminology for a photograph’s inadvertent point of interest) takes our reading into a different area, just as its title – a pun on the name of the beer, a popular Western brand, that she holds – reminds us of Manet, another realist bringing the ‘here and now’ into painting.

Robert Bechtle, Watsonville Olympia, 1977

The chair back is both part of the everyday world of the patio and a formal and connotative puzzle. One writer has suggested it serves to bring us into a theatrical space, as if the chair were analogous to the musicians partly obscuring the dancers in a Degas ballet performance. It might also serve as a semi-abstract painting itself, inserted into a realist image, or represent the suburban ideal of acculturated nature, the rural tamed by the suburban everyday. This element of strangeness can be found in other pictures, including that family portrait.

If we look more closely, as we always do with Photo-Realist art (‘to see how it’s done’), we find that the photographic clarity of the picture is not uniform – despite Bechtle’s claim that all areas – foreground, middle-ground and background – merit the same attention in paintings, there are areas here that betray the brush. Most notably in the grass the figures stand on, where no individual blade is visible.

Robert Bechtle, Roses, 1973 - detail Bechtle can certainly do those blades of grass: other pictures, like Roses, demonstrate consummate skill in replicating complex swathes of foliage.

He chooses not to here. What is the effect of this slippage? Primarily, I think it serves to defamiliarise what we take for granted, including the apparent photographic veracity of the painting.

Robert Bechtle, '67 Chrysler, 1973

It is salutary to notice just how carefully composed Bechtle’s paintings are, however much they might look like snapshots or sales brochure pictures. For example, one formal element many share is the alignment of at least one strong vertical or horizontal in the picture with the edge of the canvas, even when the depicted scene is on a slope, as here in '67 Chrysler, from 1973.

Although the car and its shadow slant towards the bottom right corner of the picture, the horizontals and verticals of the houses behind match the edges of the frame – notice, too, how the bush growing up against the wall helps to centre the picture, continued perhaps by the cracks in the tarmac that approach us. A particularly subtle example of this tendency is the way in which the car aerial links to the matching vertical of the drainpipe. It is, I believe, in the difference between the photographic and the painterly that we find the source of what I would call Bechtle’s uncanny depiction of the everyday. This can reveal marvels and mysteries, defamiliarising the everyday, uncovering what has been concealed. The homeliness – the heimlich – shifts toward the unheimlich.

Robert Bechtle, Santa Barbara Chairs, 1983

What has often been promoted as well-crafted realism can occasionally turn into something more akin to a Gothic tale, albeit usually a brightly lit one. Santa Barbara Chairs (1983) has the painter sat at a garden table, distanced from us by empty chairs and a blank tabletop. A darkly shadowed shrubbery looms behind him, while the sunshine he sits in discloses the lawn, which, as Michael Pollan points out in his essay, ‘Why Mow?’, has, through the everyday act of constant cropping, been ‘purged of sex and death’. The hose that snakes across the grass could be a lifeline or simply a hose.

Robert Bechtle, Covered Car - Missouri Street, 2001

The recent pictures of cars wrapped in tarpaulin, such as Covered Car - Missouri Street from 2001, seem to make strange that familiar everyday object that has characterised Bechtle’s work from the start, the car. This charcoal drawing seems to evoke something beyond what is depicted, shrouding the familiar and inviting a metaphorical reading.

Robert Bechtle, Broome Street Hoover, 1986

Similarly, once you know that Bechtle’s father ended up as a frustrated door-to-door salesman of vacuum cleaners, Broom Street Hoover (1986) shifts into another meaning, whilst retaining its homely eccentricity as a portrait of a man surrounded by everyday implements used for everyday purposes.

Robert Bechtle, Alameda Gran Torino, 1974 - detail

Even a painting as apparently self-explanatory as Alameda Gran Torino from 1974 can evoke an uncanny return of what has been repressed, as this account from Peter Schjeldahl demonstrates:

The station wagon can’t help but be only and exactly what Detroit fashioned. Hot sunlight can’t help but glint from a bumper and produce a faint reflection and produce a faint reflection of the windshield on a garage door. A closeness between the green of the car and that of a background shadow is unusual, but so perfectly meaningless that your mind may panic at the waste of its energy in beholding the fact. Then something peculiar can happen: your reflexive sense of a picture as a photograph breaks down, and the

object’s identity as a painting, done entirely on purpose, gains ground. Look closely. A congeries of tiny freehand strokes delivers an inconspicuous patch of foliage. The whole work is a feat of resourceful painterly artifice. At last, it’s as if the original photograph were a ghost that died and came back as a body.

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Bechtle’s artistic effort has been, to adopt Ben Highmore’s formulation, ‘to save the mundane from the negligence that surrounds it’. That it has been successful is attested to here by Peter Schjeldahl:

I immediately feel that I know [Bechtle’s paintings] thoroughly, as if from a prior life. This may be an effect of their congruence with the sorts of things that the brain, in self-defense, refuses to remember. Designed to seek import in what meets our eyes, we are equipped with ways of recognizing the unimportant in a flash, and blocking it from consciousness. Bechtle zeroes in on the always seen and never noticed...

He has done this by ‘attending to the unattended’ but perhaps, as Highmore suggests, one inevitable consequence of this ‘recontextualisation of the everyday’ is estrangement. To make the everyday visible, when it is constantly escaping, it is essential to make it strange – and art has a particular usefulness in questioning the habitual to flush out its meanings. Georges Perec argues in L’infra-ordinaire that:

What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what so long we have been pillaging from others. Not the exotic any more, but the endotic.

Robert Bechtle, Potrero Hill, 1996

Art as a ‘complex imaginary investigation’ can perform this task, but only, according to Joseph Kosuth, if the artist can develop fluency in his own culture. The challenge for that artist is well put by Arto Haapala:

an outsider puts emphasis on the recreational values, including aesthetic values, the local on everyday functional values.

In a familiar environment we often have to make a special effort to really see the visual features of things surrounding us. We see the surroundings through their functionality rather than as objects to be visually contemplated.

Familiarity, then, is both a strength in having the local knowledge to examine the endotic but also a failing if all you can see is the familiar and thus see nothing beyond it. Bechtle was fortunate in combining his rootedness with the experience, of seeing his home state as if for the first time, made strange.

Aptly enough for a Californian in the high noon of uncomplicated American materialism, Bechtle’s Damascene moment came on the drive back home after several years after serving overseas in Europe:

When I came back to California, I was kind of amazed. …I drove across country coming back and it was in the winter, so I went south and came up through the valley. And I remember getting near Bakersfield, and there was a freeway onramp there with some palm

trees on either side of it, and it had that December, wintry, glary sky, misty and very bright, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is fantastic. I could paint that…’

All of a sudden, this stuff that I’d grown up with in California, but hadn’t paid much attention to as having anything to do with art, came into focus. Everybody thinks of the Bay Area as beautiful, and it is. But growing up in a middle-class suburb in Alameda, it seemed terribly mundane and drab. From that point on, it didn’t. There’s a kind of resonance to it, a hum. I began to really see it.