Robert Bechtle was born in 1932 in San Francisco, where he continues to live and work. In 2004, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised a lauded retrospective of his work that travelled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His paintings have been included in major group exhibitions internationally since the 1960s, including America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art; The Artist as His Subject, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany; The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Les Anneés Pop, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Infinite Painting, Villa Manin Centro d'Art Contemporanea, Codroipo, Italy. Bechtle was awarded the Francis J. Greenberger Award for continued excellence in painting in 2003.
