Robert Bechtle was born in 1932 in San Francisco. He received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1954, and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1958. Recent solo exhibitions include Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and solo presentations at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. Bechtle lives and works in Berkeley, and is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim.