ABOVE: A detail from Robert Bechtle’s ‘68 Oldsmobile (1969). Bechtle’s photorealist paintings are on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 5.

The New Yorker has posted another one of Peter Schedldahl’s elliptical, maddening, but oddly illuminating reviews, this time of the Robert Bechtle show currently on at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bechtle, who was fond of paintings of superbourgeois scenes prominently featuring families and their American-made automobiles, used slides to project photos onto his canvas, which he would fill in with paint. In this, he was a practitioner of the ironically-named technique of photorealism, which was—and is—neither particularly photographic nor realistic. But they’re awfully nice paintings, as Scheldahl points out.

There are other parts of the review which approach the unspeakably pretentious, such as: “I immediately feel that I know them [the 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…” Pete, you’re killing us here.

The SFMOMA has also mounted a formidable online exhibit to accompany the whole show, so that those of us without flowers in our hair can enjoy in tandem. Much slick Flash™ery is used, with agreeable effect.

LINK: The New Yorker > The Art World > Parked Cars