Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual CultureMain MenuIntroductionConflicting Visions of Renewal in Pittsburgh's Hill District, 1950-1968 by Laura GrantmyreSan Francisco Views: Robert Bechtle and the Reformulation of Urban Vision by Bridget GilmanVisualizing Iraq: Oil, Cinema, and the Modern City by Mona DamlujiFilmic Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder by Carrie RentschlerBuses from Nowhere: Television and Anti-busing Activism in 1970s Urban America by Matt DelmontMona Damluji89c6177132ce9094bd19f4e5159eb300a76ef0dfMatthew F. Delmont5676b5682f4c73618365582367c04a35162484d5Bridget Gilman032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2Laura Grantmyre8add17c1c26ed9de6b804f44312bd03052f5735eCarrie Rentschlere7ded604f66cae2062fa490f51234edecd44a076
Slide Show: Robert Bechtle Painting Locations
12013-06-25T17:34:40-07:00Bridget Gilman032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e22558plain2013-08-14T15:00:33-07:00Bridget Gilman032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2This graphic catalogs many of the locations Bechtle has painted, including numerous images of the San Francisco Bay Area and a number of others scattered across both Northern and Southern California.
Pressing the 'play' button in the lower right-hand corner charts the locations chronologically. The blue location circles increase in diameter as the number of paintings depicting that location increases. The 'zoom' slider in the upper left-hand corner can also be adjusted to focus on the Bay Area or all of California.
12013-06-25T17:33:45-07:00Bridget Gilman032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e21. Painting the Bay AreaBridget Gilman9plain2013-08-30T18:11:11-07:00Bridget Gilman032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2
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12013-06-25T17:33:45-07:001. Painting the Bay Area6plain2013-06-29T13:06:29-07:00Bechtle has devoted several decades to representing the residential neighborhoods of the San Francisco Bay Area. Depicting ordinary, everyday activities and spaces, his work interfuses the concreteness of local images with the broad, complex issues of contemporary socio-spatial relationships. Almost all of Bechtle's paintings depict his home turf: one can chart the artist's movements through the Bay Area by tracking his oeuvre. Early paintings in Alameda are of Bechtle's hometown; canvases from the 1970s frequently picture Oakland and Berkeley, where he worked and lived during these years; in the 1980s the artist moved to San Francisco and subsequently began painting its streets and neighborhoods in earnest. Collectively, the works include environments classified as both urban and suburban–whether picturing the city of San Francisco or its smaller East Bay neighbors, Bechtle's paintings concentrate on the intersections of private and public spaces equally in these variously dense locales.