“I didn't have time to be anyone's muse...I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”
—Leonora Carrington
Carrington’s childhood home, a Gothic-revival mansion in northwest England called Crookhey Hall, appears repeatedly in her artwork, reflecting the troubling memories of her youth that remained with her throughout her life. The ominous building in this lithograph – based on an earlier painting from 1947 – also carries associations with the mental asylum in Santander, Spain to which Carrington was committed after she suffered a psychological breakdown in 1940. Here, ghostly figures eerily walk, float, swim and stand in the pastoral landscape surrounding the building, as if haunted by Carrington’s memories of her past. The running white figure in the foreground, dashing away with urgency, mirrors the artist’s early desire to escape the stifling expectations of her life at Crookhey Hall for the uninhibited life of an artist.
“I’m not interested in style... I’m interested in looking.”
—Robert Bechtle
The collection of Robert Bechtle and Whitney Chadwick, assembled over their nearly forty-year marriage, reflects Bechtle’s legacy as a preeminent Photorealist along with Chadwick’s expertise as a historian and scholar. With works by Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha, and Leonora Carrington, among others, their extensive collection of editions and works on paper represents many of Bechtle’s fellow Bay Area artists, notable names in Pop, and female figureheads of Modernism and Surrealism whom Chadwick championed through her writings and teachings.
Known for his tightly detailed renderings of suburban landscapes and vintage cars, Bechtle is considered one of the founding Photorealists, a set of artists who used photographs as a point of departure for their hyperrealist art. Such interest in notions of realism permeate the works on offer, presenting a multitude of the artistic methodologies for interpreting the world: a visual interpretation of the musicality and movement of a ballet, postmodern representations of landscape, a surreal memory of a childhood home, and even different artists’ renditions of Bechtle himself. Following his passing at the age of 88 in 2020, Bechtle’s legacy persists through his collection, inspiring the continued search for unexpected beauty in the everyday.
