Robert Bechtle

[9] By submitting a portfolio of artwork to a national "Scholastic Magazine" competition, Bechtle won a scholarship that paid for his first year of college.

When he graduated, he was drafted into the United States Army[1] and sent to Berlin, where he painted murals in the Mess Hall and delighted in visiting European museums.

Taking inspiration from his local San Francisco Bay Area surroundings, he painted friends and family and the neighborhoods, and street scenes, paying special attention to automobiles.

His painting "'61 Pontiac", (made in 1968–1969) feature an image of himself, his first wife Nancy Elizabeth (née Dalton) and their two young children in front of a car.

[14][1][2] 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".

[20] 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,[21][22] and travelled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[23] Bechtle died of Lewy body dementia while in hospice in Berkeley, California, on September 24, 2020.